Resounding Empathy:
A Critical Exploration of Ricoeur’s
Theory of Discourse, to Clarify
The Self’s Reliance on Relationships
With Other Persons
by
Benjamin Joseph Shank
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Institute for Christian Studies
© Copyright by Benjamin Shank 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction………………….…………………………………………………………………………………………1
1. Our Thesis Proposes a Ricoeurian self that is otherwise than Ricoeur’s own version...………………...……1
2. Our proposal is grounded in several philosophical, historical, and scientific contexts………………………2
3. Our contexts allow us to revisit Ricoeur on metaphor, narrative, the self, and recognition…...….………….7
4. In contrast to parts of Time and Narrative, we resound with those who influence us.…………...….9
5. Oneself as Another reveals a self enmeshed with the language that entwines us with others………….…...10
6. Linguistic anthropology reveals that empathy points to a primordial, inescapable connection…………….12
7. Integrating all four contexts reveals a self that is based on the polysemy and vitality of belonging…...…...14
CHAPTER ONE: THE GENESIS OF METAPHOR………………………………………………………………...16
1. Ricoeur’s description of metaphor emphasizes its qualities of being polysemic and being alive…………...16
2. Metaphor’s polysemic vitality relies on a suspension of literal reference…………………………………...17
3. Metaphor’s many meanings allow us to re-describe reality as it manifests……………….……………...…22
4. Metaphor casts meaning as poets do, opening possibilities philosophy has not historically considered…...27
5. Unfolding being through the possibilities of metaphor shifts truth from certitude to trust………………....32
6. Ricoeur presents the poet both as a perceptive genius and as a rhetor speaking to an audience……………36
7. Rhetors do not simply perceive but select their metaphors to produce the most plausible meanings……....41
8. Ricoeur’s arbitrary selection by “geometer” misses the possibility that perception itself is selective……...43
9. Selectivity, like language, comes from others as we come to share their sensibilities……………………...49
10. Ricoeur reframes language as exploring possibility, and ties rhetor, audience and truth in discourse……...53
CHAPTER TWO: KINDS OF TESTIMONY………………………………………………………………………...57
1. Ricoeur’s confessional testimony omits possibilities that his own understanding of metaphor introduced…57
2. Ricoeurian narrative begins and ends with a historical self, while Levinasian subjectivity faces others……60
3. Levinasian testimony begins where language ends, and “before” being appears in the world……………...67
4. Appearing before others may orient the self in a way akin to the immemorial natality we experience…….71
5. Rapprochement between Ricoeur and Levinas requires a kind of knowledge that we have already seen…...79
ii 6. The interruption that inaugurates the self’s responsibility begins the self otherwise than Ricoeur……….….80
7. To reconcile Ricoeur and Levinas, we may allow conditioned subjectivity to precede reflectivity………...84
8. Imaginative testimony would present a more open self than confessional, historical testimony would…….91
9. Imaginative testimony may, like our appearance in the world, reveal more than it intends to portray……...96
10. We may complete Ricoeur’s historically narrated subjectivity by grounding it in natality…………………98
CHAPTER THREE: ATTESTATION’S ADDRESS…………………………………………………...………..…103
1. Understanding metaphor as discourse allows us to consider it a moment of shared cognitive experience…103
2. Developmental psychology affirms that the self begins in shared cognitive experience…………………...110
3. When Ricoeur turns to narrative, he drops the language of vitality, narrowing narrative’s qualities……...119
4. Without vitality, Time and Narrative narrows the scope of possibilities that attestation can embrace……126
5. The historian’s debt to the dead broaches the possibility that debts may be animating and productive…...131
6. Understanding other minds makes possible our own understanding, just as being cared for allows trust…137
7. Attestation’s ties to discourse and our own minds imply that we may enter a world given us by others….144
CHAPTER FOUR: RECOGNIZING EMPATHY………………………………………………………...………...148
1. We hope to have shown that metaphor requires others, that we testify to our reliance on others, and that our
minds attest to our dependence on others…………………………………………………….…………….148
2. Ricoeur’s study of recognition’s definitions moves from its active to passive meanings………………….153
3. Ricoeur’s study of recognition and the gift establishes the origin of a capacity in other persons………….161
4. The phenomenon of the gift implies familial love, rather than self-interest, as our primordial condition…166
5. Personalized gifts reveal a level of empathy that reframes our political reality as inter-connected……….171
6. Empathy fulfills many requirements of the Derridean trace by which others influence the self……...…….182
7. Empathy establishes us as selves in a world of others, and does so in a way we cannot reciprocate………188
8. Empathy unites our studies, providing a means for the transmission of metaphor, the resonance between
persons, the learning of trust, and a primordial connection that explains nurture in society……………….191
CHAPTER FIVE: THE FRAME OF BELONGING………………………………………………………………...199
iii 1. Conceptions of grief and morning in Eastern societies reveal a self that is first and inescapably social…. 199
2. An essentially social self becomes by imitation, resounds with influence, relies on nurture and develops a
mind through empathetic understanding…………………………………………………………………...205
3. Within a frame of belonging, we would become ourselves with, through and by other persons………….211
4. While Gadamer proposes knowledge through belonging, and Habermas advocates knowledge through
rational criticism, Ricoeur suggests knowledge through both belonging and critique…………………….216
5. Rigorous study of belonging might reveal that traditions will inevitably be critiqued by traditions………221
6. New metaphors for self and other may allow us to realize the polysemic vitality of the person…………...230
CONLCUSION………………………………………………………………………………………...……………242
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………...…………254
iv Acknowledgements
The lineage of this particular philosophical organism is long, complex, and interconnected, as all good taxonomies must be:
from the Kingdom Parentes Curans: Roxanne and Stephen Shank, Juanita Shank, Joyce
Dyarman, Ken Pierson, and Joseph and Mary Shank
from the Phylum Magistri Primi: Ted Lehman, Crustal Downing, Henry Venema, Helen
Walker, Rev. Aron Kramer, Megan Ginnick
from the Class Magistri Posteri: Robin Collins, Doug Frank, Amy Marga, Peter Powers,
Kathryn Schifferdecker, Dirk Lange
of the Order Philosopha Majora: Aristotle, Paul Ricoeur, Daniel J. Siegel, Emmanuel
Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida
of the Family Luces Ducentes: Henry Venema (again), James Olthuis, Nik Ansell, Alan
Padgett, Patrick Kiefert, Stephanie Arel
of the Genus Subsidium Directum: Jeff Dudiak, Morny Joy, Bob Sweetman
of the Species Patientia Tremenda: Ron Kuipers, the sharp-eyed audience of one
v
For my Mother
vi Introduction
1. Our thesis proposes the possibility of a self, grounded in Ricoeur’s own work, that is nonetheless otherwise than Ricoeur’s version The goal of this dissertation is to use Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor as developed in The Rule of Metaphor to further our understanding of the self and its relation to other persons.
While Ricoeur does eventually present a full-fledged anthropology, he develops it through narrative structure, which results in a conception of the self that is different than one derived through metaphor might have been. Namely, while a narrative self is congenial to alterity, our thesis is that a self that is conceived through metaphor would rely upon alterity at its most fundamental level: not as a detour or dialectic, but as its very condition of origin. After introducing Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor in the first chapter, we will use each subsequent chapter to focus on several points after The Rule of Metaphor where Ricoeur might have developed his understanding of the self – and its relation to alterity – somewhat differently than he in fact did under the narrative structure.
Even our first chapter proposes one such possibility, in that Ricoeur did not fully consider metaphor’s origin as learnable techne, and thus missed a possibility to understand metaphor as imitative play between persons. The second chapter explores Ricoeur’s disagreement with
Levinas, and proposes that, since no kind of language can make a full accounting of any person, to account for the influence of other persons on the self, a complete understanding of testimony must include a kind of testimony that is more than verbal, akin to the resonance through which artists of every kind learn techne. The third chapter studies Ricoeur’s understanding of attestation, the trust one implicitly places in oneself as the author of one’s own acts, and notes that what Ricoeur counts as a secondary sense of attestation, one’s trust played out in a world of others, actually seems, developmentally, to precede the trust in the self, and demonstrably does
1 so in the acquisition of language. The fourth chapter examines Ricouer’s laudable work on recognition, and adds that a full understanding of the person must also include empathy, particularly in the passive sense of being empathized with, to account for growth into vital adulthood. We conclude by presenting a few features that a self who is understood through metaphor might have, chief among them a relation with alterity that is inextricably vital, and grounded in a framework of belonging.
2. Our proposal is grounded in several historical and philosophical contexts that variously challenge or more fully illuminate Ricoeur’s anthropological project
This dissertation’s proposal of a metaphoric self – or at least a tentative, initial sketch of one – is conceived in several contexts. First, the self is understood against the background of the tradition of selves developed first through Descartes and then the phenomenology of Husserl, and ultimately Ricoeurian anthropology itself. These portraits of the self differ over the precise composition of the self, but agree to its essential nature. Though Ricoeur in particular seems to promote the other to the status of partner in a dialectic, he still ultimately upholds the Cartesian tradition which states that there is nothing more fundamental to the self than its own thinking about, and as, itself. This remains true even as Ricoeur gives the self its narrative form.
Secondly, the self is here understood within the context of developmental science, particularly with regards to cognition and attachment theory. The findings of developmental science speak to the importance of childhood and the value of a self whose reflectivity is anchored in its affective, emotional life, including that life’s dependence on other persons for nurture, growth, and security. From the very onset of our lives, our reliance on others provides the resources by which we construct ourselves – the influence of others shapes us well into adulthood, just as it once made the shaping of that self possible.
2 Third, our understanding of the self occurs in the context of linguistic anthropology, which seeks to understand language as humans have used it. Linguistic anthropologists have found language to be key to our development, both individually and as a species. It is language that allows us to capture another’s attention, and language which allows us to develop a theory of mind, our sense of others as other people like us in the world. When considering the self and its development, we come to understand that language is a means of that development, and an inescapable part of the self that forms through it. It is in this context that our attention to a particular form of language, metaphor, becomes most important.
Finally, the dissertation is conceived against the backdrop of a Judeo-Christian ethic, which tends to see the self as something other than the center of the moral universe, and has a long tradition of emphasizing care for widows, orphans, and aliens of every kind – as well as, of course, asserting our utter dependence on God as the most holy Other of all. As Levinas did, we work in the shadow of Buber’s “I-Thou.”1 While this dissertation does not seek to provide any ethic, and certainly hopes to stop far short of offering any theology, it is perhaps worthwhile for it to seek a self that is not entirely contrary to those views, and to ask how an anthropology conceived in such a vein might help us understand ourselves, whether we maintain a Judeo-
Christian tradition or not.
It may help us to look at these particular contexts more closely. To say that we work against the background of a Cartesian tradition of the self is, perhaps, both too broad and too narrow, in the sense that, with this dissertation, we join a historical conversation about the self that is mostly French Cartesian, conducted within a much broader conversation about the rise of
1 Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 59–74.
3 individualism in the West. Such a tradition, like any other conversation, is bound to have particular emphases and silences. So it is with interest that we note that French individualism, in particular, sees the private as the withdrawal from formal public life.2 Now we hope to make clear that Ricoeur, with his emphasis on public rhetoric and the importance of discourse to all human knowledge, as well as his later emphasis on living with others in just institutions, seeks very much to overturn this withdrawal, and to reassert the individual’s rightful and necessary place in the public realm. But we also hope to make clear that he also concedes the initial separation: the private is separate from the public, and the individual must work to influence society. This separation seems inevitable until one realizes that there are, of course, other possibilities, such as the British sense of the interactions of private individuals naturally bringing vitality to the same public sphere.3 Outside of France, the concepts of private and public may already be at least somewhat integrated; their initial separation need not, necessarily, be assumed; the work may be always and already underway. Part of the purpose of this dissertation is to provide, through metaphor, the beginning of another possibility for understanding the self that happens to be more in the manner of the British conception of the private, though it does not develop from it.
To say that we work against the backdrop of developmental science is to acknowledge our debt to a relatively new field of inquiry that is swiftly becoming established. Daniel J.
Siegel’s landmark work in The Developing Mind is our flagship support in this endeavor, but
Siegel himself relies on the discipline of neuroscience and the psychology of attachment theory to form his conclusion that a mind is not something that we, necessarily, get to have to ourselves.
2 Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 480. 3 Siegel, 480.
4 Rather, it is developed and even sustained by connecting to others in empathy. Moreover, by joining neurobiology to attachment theory, Siegel also robustly develops something that is perhaps even more significant for philosophical anthropology than his somewhat novel take on the philosophy of mind: the signal importance of childhood for adult identity, even to the extent of considering a “childhood’s childhood,” where the first two years of a person’s life guide the shaping of their adult identity. Psychology has, since Freud, believed this to be the case, but philosophy has, until relatively recently, done little to advance beyond Aristotle’s notion that childhood is prospective, a time of potentiality, important only insofar as it will eventually provide workable adults.4 If developmental science is correct, however, childhood not only provides the capacities that adults will have, but guides the way the adult will prefer to use them, integrating them into identity at very fundamental levels. Philosophy can now begin to take some accounting of this – for our part, we suggest in this dissertation that childhood allows us to glimpse our fundamentally passive relation to alterity in ways which adult reflectivity and narration may otherwise obscure.
Developmentally, too, the context of linguistic anthropology is important, as understanding how language develops allows us to see the importance of alterity to identity at a level beyond the individual. Socially, language is involved in our construction both culturally and as a species. As we learn language, we gain the ability to learn intention, to share attention, and to direct the attention of others. These abilities go hand in hand with the broadest function of language, “which involves in all cases the attempt of one person to manipulate the intentional or
4 Gareth Matthews and Amy Mullin, “The Philosophy of Childhood,” in Stanford Encycolopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Langauge and Information), accessed November 6, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/childhood/.
5 mental states of other persons.”5 The work of Michael Tomasello and Charles Taylor, as they each expound this understanding, ties the acquisition and use of language to the fundamental role that other persons play in a capacity which is itself essential to our identity as persons. In their discussions of language as a capacity to both learn and affect the mental states of others,
Tomasello and Taylor each agree with Ricoeur’s emphasis on discourse as the means by which knowledge is conveyed, and establish the need for a relational theory which goes beyond understanding in the conventional, rational sense.6 If we are to fully understand how language works when people converse with one another as well as its effect on the self, we will have to learn more about how people affect one another’s mental states. We will have to make some philosophical account of empathy – as emotions are mental states that have significant and demonstrable impact on the self and its development.
Finally, when we say that we offer this dissertation in the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics, we mean one that is primarily represented in the philosophical literature by
Emmanuel Levinas, but also advanced in Ricoeur’s later writing. This context is crucial because of its manifest tension with our first context of the Cartesian tradition of the self, which emphasizes reflective, epistemic concerns.7 The friction between the two contexts extends to a
5 Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Association (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 6 First Tomasello, who writes: “If there is no clean break between the more rule-based and the more idiosyncratic items and structures of a language, then all constructions may be acquired with the same basic set of acquisitional processes – namely, those falling under the general headings of intention-reading and pattern-finding.” Since intention-reading is not strictly a rational process that is itself built into how humans learn the language which is used in discourse, the understanding that language opens through discourse will itself be inflected by intention- reading. Tomasello, 6. Similarly, Taylor writes, “once we come to see how language can help constitute our emotions, feelings, norms, we are cured from a narrow view of the functions of language as encoding information.” Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 35–36. 7 Alexander Schlutz, Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009).
6 fundamental paradox of selfhood: being born of two traditions, the Cartesian self which is essentially epistemic, formed around a core of its autonomous selfhood, must negotiate a moral world populated by others, to which its subjectivity is not at all essential. While we may or may not agree with a common understanding of Levinas that knowing others is exercising some form of dominion over them, we can certainly agree that there is no necessary correlation between knowing a person and doing or being good for them – at least insofar as we ordinarily understand those terms. Though further knowledge is often helpful, particularly in averting harm, we can often do the right thing with very little information on hand. But what if there were a way of understanding the self that is, instead, fundamentally ethical? Levinas emphasizes the ethic of the
Other to such an extent that his understanding of the self, much like the self he actually implies, must be gleaned through inference and secondary mention; yet the far more robust self of
Ricoeurian narrativity, by definition, struggles to imagine a universe in which it is not, ultimately, still a reflective epistemic center. Our brief sketch of a self modeled from metaphor invites others to provide the richness of a Ricoeurian self to a subjectivity that begins, essentially, in Levinas and a Judeo-Christian ethic.
3. The contexts of our studies allow us to bring to bear important findings from other disciplines as we explore Ricoeur’s work on metaphor, narrative, the self, and recognition.
Our first chapter takes up and examines Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor as established in The Rule of Metaphor, and concludes that his framing of metaphor as a shared cognitive event is a crucial and provocative innovation, as is his addition of the qualities of polysemy and vitality as ways to talk about the validity of metaphors. Yet he simply concurs with the philosophy of Aristotle that the origin of metaphor lies in “unguessed genius,” the
7 ability to perceive real likeness that others do not see. This position seems to contradict our current, science-driven understanding that perception itself is constructed and guided by parents or other caregivers on the individual level and by culture on the social scale; it is not simply intuited but is learned by everyone. Ricoeur’s position may also disagree with an equally and perhaps contradictorily Aristotelian understanding of metaphor as rhetoric, and therefore as a type of techne, a verbal art or craft. It is learned by those of lesser skill from those of greater skill; it is gained in the relation of an apprentice to a master. Like every art, metaphor is a kind of creative play that produces private understanding for public offering.
Our first chapter thus occurs largely against the backdrop of the first and second contexts:
Cartesian anthropology and developmental science. The definition of metaphor itself challenges a Cartesian self that is concerned primarily with knowing for oneself; metaphors, being deliberate category mistakes, are as much about leading others to discover as they are about finding a surprising likeness for oneself. Metaphors, being addressed to other people, rely on the presence of others, overt or implied, for their very generation. More deeply disruptive still to the
Cartesian self is the notion that metaphor as a capacity would come from others; if others shape the way we see the world, then our judgments are bound up with the judgments of other people, and yet if art is revelatory, those perceptions are made not less reliable for the influence of masters, but more so. Far from being potentially deceptive devils, others in our lives can be, and indeed must often be, trustworthy masters of rendering our world.
The relation of apprentice to master in the creation of verbal techne points directly to our second context of developmental science. Mastering metaphor ultimately requires a theory of mind, the capacity to imagine that others possess minds more or less like one’s own, so that we know that our metaphors will not truly deceive them. The understanding of metaphor marks a
8 real progression in our emergence as functioning persons in the world, and a crucial part in developing our own minds. The capacity for metaphor would seem to indicate that our minds are indeed not entirely our own, not if the metaphors we use, which necessarily involve other people, shape the way we ourselves think, as the linguists Lakoff and Johnson convincingly attest.8 Our minds are sparked and shaped by the minds of others, through metaphor specifically and through language generally.9 This is so because the first masters of metaphor that we meet are those who parent us. When we imitate our parents, we adapt their language and adopt their point of view.
Their metaphors and their minds are the first we understand, and the ones most intimately bound up with our own.
4. Developmental science and linguistic anthropology contrast some points of Time and Narrative, showing us that we resound with those who have influenced us, often through communication that is more than verbal.
Our second chapter proceeds from this understanding to assert that there must be a testimony that is not, or at least is not only, verbal. For it is not only the words of our parents that we imitate and adopt, but also their priorities, character, affect, and demeanor – i.e., their sensibility. This means that our second chapter is conceived against the second and third contexts of developmental science and of linguistic anthropology. We argue that Ricoeur’s understanding of testimony is essentially confessional, relying as it does on the strictures of time, causality, and the self’s experience in the world. This contrasts sharply with the Levinasian understanding that
8 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999). 9 Here we begin to use metaphor to speak of things that might also be true of language as a whole. Metaphor seems to us to be an exemplary case of language because of its conceptual complexity, its emotional import, and its interactive nature. Language more broadly understood may well have less of these qualities, but does not seem to be entirely devoid of them.
9 testimony is perhaps supra-verbal, as people embody their own response to the vulnerability of others.10 If Levinas is at all correct about the inability of language to grasp or convey a full understanding of the Other, or of our encounter with them, then it seems that we will need to account for a form of testimony that is more than verbal.
Our understanding of imitative learning, exemplified in learning metaphor as techne, but also going beyond it, seems to provide just such an accounting. In imitating others, we are influenced by them; being influenced by them, we testify to the effect that they have upon us.
This is true for masters of many skills, a list that naturally includes our parents. Others, particularly family, so heavily affect us that we may be said to “resound” with their influence; language is simply the most apparent way that this is so. Testimony can come in many forms.
For our part, we call the influence that others have upon our lives affective attestation, and conclude that we can think of Levinas as speaking more truly of children than he does of adults, and we can think of Ricoeur as speaking more truly of adults than he does of children. This will allow us to reconcile Ricoeur and Levinas, so long as, when it comes to identity, we strive to understand the considerable, but not overwhelming, influence that childhood has upon the adult, as well as the considerable, but not overwhelming, limitation and power that language places on our ability to understand and respond to other people.
5. Against the contexts of the Cartesian self and linguistic anthropology, our study of Oneself as Another reveals a self that is enmeshed in language that entwines us with – and addresses us toward – other people.
If an understanding of the self that is more like Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor is going to both include – and also go beyond – language, what, then, will be language’s role in the development of the self? Our third chapter turns to attestation and to discourse to answer this
10 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 216.
10 question, placing it against the backdrop of the third context, linguistic anthropology, and also against the backdrop of the first context, the tradition of the reflective, Cartesian self. We argue, with Ricoeur, that people use language overwhelmingly as discourse, as someone saying something to someone about something. Nearly all language use is conversational. This means that language tends to retain three essential characteristics: it contains, in its very origin, some primordial notion of another, of another person that is an audience; it has the quality of being addressed by, of being oriented toward, as a very condition of its being, that other person; and it has the quality of being an event that is cognitive, of minds, and that must in some sense be shared between minds if it is to be effective. These three contexts fit broadly with the notion that language is used to affect the mental states of others and to direct their attention. To the extent that language ties our development to the minds of others, it would also belie the positing of a
Cartesian self that mainly forms identity through self-reflection. We intimately resound with the influence of others as we begin to speak, which marks a significant stage of our own appearance in the world. Yet this does not stop with adulthood; later in life, our language reflects the influence of others simply because we address ourselves to them, so that they will understand us, and recognize our presence in their world, as well as our interests and concerns.
But it is our first enmeshing with others that matters most for our development. Through language, our minds are formed as they gain awareness of other minds and share with and influence them. As we learn from others how and what to perceive and focus our attention on, the world we are presented is manifestly a world of others. The scientific literature indicates that it is in reflexively imitating others that we come to have our own sense of agency, of being able to act upon this world that is not, at first, our own. In its reliance upon others, and in our own capacity to assume and understand another person’s mind, metaphor is simply a signal instance
11 of discourse, as discourse itself is an exemplary case of language, and language itself is a paradigmatic example of a capacity that the self develops early in life, under the influence of others that resonates through all the rest of life – in ways that are more than linguistic.
6. Linguistic anthropology reveals that empathy, rather than recognition, both underscores our reliance on others and points to a primal connection that makes our dependence inescapable.
When we understand other minds as minds, we are able to appreciate not only what they might think but also register what they might feel; when we are correct we understand ourselves to be more connected to that person. This is the phenomenon of empathy, and developmental science is finding it key to our earliest years of life. Along with Ricoeur’s work on recognition, we make empathy the focus of our fourth chapter, placing it in the second context of developmental science and, by implication, the fourth context of Judeo-Christian ethics. While
Ricoeur’s recognition rightly acknowledges that one must be recognized by others in order to recognize even oneself, recognition in and of itself does not offer all we need to become fully developed persons. Human development also requires emotional nurture, meaning that others must confirm to us that they not only recognize our existence and our dignity, but can relate to, and indeed share, the way we think and feel about the world. “Feeling felt” in this way allows us to believe that our interior worlds are real and that they matter. In this way, empathy allows us to develop our sense of ourselves and locates us in the real world. Without empathy, without others affirming, both verbally and non-verbally, the reliability of our inner worlds, we could never have become who we are. Without attuning to the mental states of others, we cannot develop as ourselves.
12 Empathy allows us to imitate others, and it allows particular others to shape us in particular ways. Attachment theory describes the effects that patterns of empathetic attachment have on the formation of young minds, establishing how infants and children will process their own emotions, and even how they will think and feel about themselves later in life. Thus, the period during which others most influence us turns out to have, itself, a great deal of influence over us. Empathy affects us so deeply that if we are to correct the damaging cognitive and affective patterns of our earliest childhood, it is once again through empathic relationships, either therapeutic or otherwise, that we will be able to do it. While empathy is profound, it is also mundane enough to be ubiquitous, as we can see, for example, when we prefer to receive gifts from those closest to us, gifts that show that they know us and understand what truly pleases us, over gifts that are simply and formally given as routine. Our emotional attunement to others will never cease to matter, in ways both large and small.
We resound with others throughout our lives, denying any framework that assumes we are separated from others at a primordial level, a separation that threatens violence and requires a rational contract to assure our safety. Empathy instead provides a framework that assumes connection at a primordial level and promises nurture, providing emotional connection to fuel and direct our growth. As a connection that opens and closes – that is, repeatedly begins, grows, and lapses – the attunement of mental states that is empathy resembles the much-philosophized notion of the trace, that rather abstract feature by which others extend into our mental lives despite distance and separation, a paradox of presence and absence. Furthermore, the natural presence of empathy in our lives makes us all the more responsible to and for one another when it breaks down. This places empathy directly in the fourth context; it is a primordial feature of our lives that should, by highlighting our reliance on others, entail our natural regard for them.
13 However, like all capacities, it can be thwarted, diminished, or entirely broken down by other factors. We can see how it has been obscured by reflective philosophies that center upon the self.
But by turning to empathy as an area open to philosophical inquiry, it is possible that we may make more informed decisions based in a philosophy of the self that entails, by definition, deep regard for other people.
7. Our fifth chapter integrates all four contexts to present a glimpse of a metaphoric, rather than narrative, self that is based on the polysemy and vitality of belonging with others. It is our concern for frameworks, for the assumptions that underlie our philosophy, which animates our fifth chapter, in which we propose a self that is framed by belonging. This belonging occurs squarely against the backdrop of the Cartesian tradition and fully in the Judeo-
Christian context, though it has more in common with non-Western frameworks than might be obvious, as we draw from markedly Western sources such as the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer to understand it. While a complete effort to propose a self that is framed by belonging must lie finally outside the scope of this dissertation, our studies suggest two features that a “belonging self” might have: namely polysemy and vitality. If we acknowledge the influence that others have upon us, we acknowledge our debt to them. But that debt is precisely the kind of debt that can never be repaid, because it has given us ourselves – and continues to do so. It is an animating debt, and others continue to bring us vitality as they increase, through our belonging with them, the ways and contexts in which we can be known and understood. Others increase our potential liveliness and meaning in the world because they enrich and multiply the contexts in which we meaningfully live. Indeed, we could not live the way we do in the world at all were it not for our connections to others. When we realize this, our default affective state for encountering others, and for thinking about other people generally – including our theorizing about alterity – may
14 switch from an anxious mix of hope and fear to one of anticipation and gratitude. Such a change may place a self of belonging, and its relation to alterity, outside of our current vocabulary of presumptive alienation, of an “I” and a “You” that are essentially estranged and must work through rational discourse to build any kind of real common ground or worthwhile understanding. But if we can begin to challenge our own assumptions about what is vital to the self, and develop new vocabulary, we can bring into being an understanding of the self that is more in line with the moral good of true human thriving, and thus conceive a self around which our epistemic and our moral philosophies might cohere.
15 CHAPTER ONE:
THE GENESIS OF METAPHOR
1.1. We will begin by exploring Ricoeur’s description of metaphor, noting that Ricoeur’s famous claim that all language is metaphorical relies on the properties of being polysemic and of being alive or lively.
We seek, in this chapter, to describe metaphor: what it is, what it entails, and how it works. Our great summative help in this endeavor will be the work of Ricoeur, specifically his splendid The Rule of Metaphor. We will work to read him as he reads others: charitably, with a thorough and fair understanding of the text on its own terms. We will see what it offers, and what its limitations are. Then, finally, we will see in what direction its incompleteness gestures – for any worthwhile philosophical work must be in some way incomplete. Ricoeur’s own career attests to this, as he turned again and again to the questions his most recent studies provoked. He even does so within The Rule of Metaphor itself, as one chapter provokes questions that lead to the next. We will take his structure as our own, not only for this chapter but for the dissertation as a whole.
We begin this chapter on The Rule of Metaphor by noting perhaps its most striking claim: that all language is metaphorical. That is, not all language is metaphor, but all language comes from metaphor, as a question of genealogy. To begin, metaphor possesses what Ricoeur terms semantic impertinence. That is, metaphor specifically does not mean what it says, but really means something quite different. The surprise of this provokes disorientation in a reader or audience, whom we shall call collectively the auditor. Auditors, being disoriented, see or hear the meaning the metaphor illuminates as if for the first time: they understand anew.
The difficulty with the phenomenon of shock and recognition that metaphor provokes is that it cannot last. The new understanding, like the surprise itself, can only remain new for a little
16 while before auditors become accustomed to it. The once striking turn of phrase becomes expected and routine. It no longer works as metaphor the same way. In fact, it no longer functions as metaphor at all. Ricoeur speaks of such metaphors as dead. We call them clichés, or, if routine enough, ordinary language, as when tables have literal legs rather than metaphorical ones.
The only way that metaphor can forestall this fate is by being polysemic, that is, by possessing multiple valid meanings. Thus, a metaphor can repeatedly strike one anew. Polysemic metaphor expresses not only one meaning, but several. Set free, such metaphor can surpass not only the intent of its composer, but also the understanding of any one auditor at a given time.
Metaphors express more than one truth by expressing more than one meaning. If the meanings complement each other, we may even say that metaphor has expanded truth, because we are conscious of new truth we could not have been conscious of before. Surpassing the linear, one- note meaning of dictionary definition, metaphors unfold truth as a three-dimensional conceptual space. They open a new world.
1.2. Metaphor’s polysemic vitality relies on a suspension of literal reference to initiate surprise and bring about a metaphor’s manifold possible meanings
For Ricoeur, a metaphor is a category mistake, albeit a deliberate one;11 his readers have been astute to note that his understanding of metaphor relies upon semantic impertinence.12
Makers of metaphor, by definition, apply aspects of one linguistic subject to another subject in a way that is not, strictly speaking, logically justifiable. Indeed, metaphor’s deliberate mistake is
11 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 197. 12 Ricoeur. See also Mark C. Muldoon, “Reading, Imagination and Interpretation: A Ricoeurian Response,” trans. Robert Czerny, International Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2008): 69–83; Roger W.H. Savage, “Ricoeur and Musicology: Music, Hermeneutics and Aesthetic Experience,” in Ricoeur Across the Disciplines, ed. Scott Davidson (New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010).
17 the one thing we can be certain of, as the most immediately obvious thing about a metaphor is that it cannot be literally true.13 “My mother is a fish” cannot possibly mean that the speaker understands his mother to be a fish unless some delusion is at work.14 Something else is obviously intended, and intended for a specific reason.
Metaphor, in Ricoeur’s theory, suspends literal reference.15 And it does so in order to produce a desired effect, which is surprise, followed by re-orientation.16 When one hears a metaphor, one embarks on a mental project to attempt to understand. In our example, we wonder what it could possibly mean that a boy’s mother is a fish. One sifts or filters very quickly through a number of denotations and connotations for each of a metaphor’s terms until one finds two that are similar17 – in Faulkner’s usage, this similarity seems to be, in the eyes of the small boy who makes the comparison, that both mother and fish are dead.
The product of this process is a new understanding; Aristotle speaks of the process as a movement, usually the act of taking a noun from one category and placing it in another.18 We readers see the mother anew, for example, if we have not understood the depth of her impact on the boy. Similarly, notes Ricoeur, one may also see the fish anew.19 An entire system of words
13 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 217. 14 We use the famous metaphor from William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying for a number of reasons: the novel is now a more commonly known use of metaphor than epic poetry; the metaphor is particularly striking in its context; and it serves as an example of a literary master having one of his own characters create a metaphor in turn. If we are going to understand how Ricoeur understands metaphor to function, we might well see it best displayed in one of the most deliberate and vivid instances of metaphor. See William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 84. 15 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 230. 16 Ricoeur, 27. 17 Ricoeur, 236. 18 As Ricoeur writes, “the second characteristic is that metaphor is described as a sort of displacement, a movement ‘from…to…’ This notion of ephiphora enlightens at the same time as it puzzles us…for Aristotle the word metaphor applies to every transposition of terms.” Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 17. Citing Lucas, Donald William, Aristotle’s Poetics: Greek text. Introduction, commentary, and appendices. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. (Likely referring to 1457b of the Poetics). See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, The Modern Library Classics, Paperback Edition. (New York: Random House, 2001.) 19 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 76.
18 and their meaning has been opened or unchained. One possible meaning disclosed by “my mother is a fish” in its literary context is that humans are no more capable of agency than simple animals when faced with the irrevocable reality of death.20 Metaphor manifests new meaning – that is, it displays new meanings even as it creates them, whenever the reader “works out” or
“uncovers” a binding element between a metaphor’s two terms. The metaphor is, as Ricoeur says, alive. It shifts, and changes our perceptions.
However, when a metaphor’s new meaning eventually becomes known, agreed upon, and commonly used, it becomes cliché, and goes on its way to becoming ordinary language, just another entry in the dictionary. Surprise and discovery, of course, cannot last forever for anyone.
And the narrowing of any metaphor’s possible meanings continues as its audience eliminates less plausible interpretations. The new understanding will eventually become an additional dictionary definition, as when talk of a table’s “leg” fails to surprise us today. We may say that such a metaphor is dead. It is common, ordinary language. Narrow denotation is the death of metaphor, and denotative reduction is the process of its dying.
Thus, the vitality of a metaphor matters as much as its validity – indeed it becomes a way of speaking of its validity. We do not believe that we can overstate the importance of this
Ricoeurian insight. The original French title of the Rule of Metaphor declares, with its exclamation, that metaphor lives!21 As with so many of Ricoeur’s deliberate choices, the title of his book does several things at once. Not only does Metaphor Vive! announce the resurgent vitality of metaphor (in the wake of the Enlightenment’s dismissal of metaphorical speech as
20 Later, the boy elaborates on the metaphor: “She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when we come to the water again I am going to see her. My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish.” Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 196. 21 Paul Ricoeur, La Metaphor Vive (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
19 merely ornamental) and return our attention to the Aristotelian notion of rhetorical force, the book’s title also intimates that liveliness is a quality that such rhetoric ought to have.
Indeed, metaphor’s force is its vitality, and, in time, the vitality of all living languages – as Ricoeur understands most language to be or have been at one point metaphorical.22 This is why metaphor’s surprising disorientation is important: it allows us to say our thoughts anew. For him, counterintuitively, living metaphor – and not prosaic speech – is the generator of language.
This happens because living metaphors allow for the possibility of many memorable meanings.
For Ricoeur, seeing the world anew seems necessary to truly see the world at all – so long as we allow that the world possesses meaning sufficiently rich to transcend cliché, as most people likely would.
Vitality and polysemy seem to be metaphor’s most significant qualities for Ricoeur, and they come hand in hand. Metaphors can and often do have more than one meaning, and the longer they do, the longer they remain alive. This is true even for the author of a metaphor: although the author must craft a connection between a metaphor’s terms or poles, that connection can be, and in many cases will be, greater than any consciously intended link. Our example demonstrates this clearly enough when the uneducated country boy declares: “my mother is a fish.” What we said above – that “my mother is a fish” means that both are helpless in the face of death – is only one possible meaning of the metaphor. Another in a broader context may be that the boy somehow understands himself as helpless to save either of them. In this case, his ineffectuality would also be a common element. Our understanding is enriched by all such meanings, so long as they are plausible.
22 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 63.
20 That a metaphor, in Ricoeur’s understanding, cannot simply be reduced to its author’s intended meaning opens a whole array of possibilities for the meaning of that metaphor. Multiple meanings need not contradict, and might rather complement, each other. We can imagine this creative broadening working in several ways. Young and terrified, the boy in Faulkner’s novel has little conscious idea what he means, but clearly understands and means something by the metaphor, or he would not use it. Yet, having said several things about his mother’s death at once, he may well have come to understand it better, as articulating grief is one way of understanding loss.23 Faulkner, being a masterful artisan as well as the author of the metaphor’s broadest context, would likely have desired to mean as many plausible things as possible when using it, to provide the richest and most vivid language possible for readers. In so doing, Ricoeur would say, Faulkner would have ensured that his language live as long as possible. For the longer a metaphor can resist denotative reduction, the longer it can stay alive. The auditor of a metaphor is not confined to referencing the dictionary definition of a word, or finding one
“hidden” meaning at all. Similarly, the maker of a metaphor is released from failing if a particular metaphorical connection isn’t necessarily understood, so long as the audience takes up new, insightful, and plausible ones.
Metaphor’s vitality through polysemy thus opens up, or even constructs, a space in which both rhetor and audience can understand, allowing a broader knowing to be shared between them. Ricoeur expands upon this theme later in Time and Narrative as he moves to the
“world of the text,”24 and later still in his notions of truth as a conceptual space in which one
23 “The etymology of the word grief in French implies that both concepts— grief and grievance—are actually contained within one another. This suggests that the work of grief and the articulation of a grievance must go together for freedom to be achieved.” Francois Lionett, “Translating Grief,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, STU-Student Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 320. 24 Bernard Dauenhauer and David Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2017, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/ricoeur/.
21 might walk.25 Metaphor as a subject thus begins a long chain of thinking in Ricoeur, seeming to open up a whole new world of truth for him, just as metaphor as an event of language opens up a world of understanding for author and audience alike, so long as it works in the way that Ricoeur believes it does.
1.3. Metaphor’s manifold meanings allow us to re-describe reality as it manifests – and to reconsider our understanding of being.
Language, particularly metaphor, expands our understanding. This expansion is
Ricoeur’s chief concern, both toward the end of The Rule of Metaphor and in the following years. For him, when we talk about metaphor, we are not only talking about language. We are also talking about being, that to which truth refers. We have entered the realm of metaphysics.
Thus, we may draw on his own understanding of being, as given in The Rule of Metaphor and elsewhere, to illuminate the place and importance of metaphor in philosophy. Put simply, metaphor matters to philosophy because truth is shaped by language; it is, by its very nature, linguistic. For it is language that unfolds the conceptual world we inhabit. As Ricoeur writes in
History and Truth: “Communication is the only way through the narrowness of humankind.
Truth is that in which we each continually move toward self-clarification by unfolding our self- perception in communication with others.”26 For Ricoeur, truth is not an object but a space, field, or condition in which we may operate – and that space or condition is limned by words.
Articulation unfolds, or reveals by expanding, what is already there.
Ricoeur is able to claim that language shapes being because of a careful reading of
Heidegger, who claims we cannot talk about being without talking about manifestation. His own
25 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelby (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 54. 26 Ricoeur, 2.
22 subsequent position is similar, if more daring: we must understand the appearance of being in the world. We cannot understand being without understanding manifestation. This much is evident in an essay Ricoeur writes just before The Rule of Metaphor, “Manifestation and Proclamation.”
While it is true that, in this essay, Ricoeur intends to write more theologically about the manifestation of God, in this work we may be able to grasp something of his understanding of manifestation generally, regardless of what manifests. His largest purpose in writing the essay is to establish a dialectic of manifestation and proclamation, with each phenomenon occupying one of two poles.27 He goes on to structure his argument around dividing those traits of religious experience which “do not enter into a hermeneutic of proclamation” from “those traits of a hermeneutic proclamation that are either virtually or in fact destructive of the sacred.”28
What matters to Ricoeur is that a dialectic occurs when the proclamation of the original manifestation inevitably diminishes the original, founding theophany through a word which emphasizes the ethical or historical over the natural and natural correspondences.29 This is because the sacred produces awe through a power that cannot be spoken, and the sacred must nonetheless be manifest through something that is not the sacred, in times and spaces that are, themselves, either more or less sacred. What determines the potency of the manifestation of the sacred, then, is the ritual that precedes or follows the manifestation.30 And it is the language of the ritual that can regain the meaning of the sacred through parables, hyperbole, and other “limit- expressions” which present a universe that has burst or exploded.31 The rest of the essay consists of an argument that religious folk, particularly Christians, ought to understand the iconoclasm
27 Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 48. 28 Ricoeur, 48. 29 Ricoeur, 55–56. 30 Ricoeur, 48–55. 31 Ricoeur, 60.
23 that manifestation presents – and the desanctification that proclamation presents – as part of a dialectic which, conveyed through language, must be held in order to transform the world in ways that God intends.32
To illustrate this transformation, Ricoeur draws upon Jesus in the Gospels, and Jesus’s own use of parables and “poetic language” with a symbolic function.33 That function is to be,
Ricoeur writes, “an instrument of redescription.”34 The parallels of the poetic language of the
Gospels to metaphor generally continue: “poetic language in the broad sense of the word abolishes the reference of ordinary language that is a first-order descriptive... and by means of this epoche of natural reality opens up a new dimension of reality.... The parable brings about this epoche that wipes out the first-order descriptive reference in favor of the metaphorical reference that works here as a model does.”35 Indeed, the parallels to metaphor and poetic discourse (and, Ricoeur notes, to Aristotle’s Poetics) are so strong that he asks: “What is religious in all this?”36
The answer, it seems to Ricoeur, is that the poetic discourse of religion breaks away from the language of natural correspondence that religion initially tended to have. In other words, when religion takes up poetic discourse, it does so in extension of the theme that Ricoeur takes up from Mircea Eliade: even during hierophany, direct visions of God, we cannot describe the numinous, but can describe how the numinous shows itself.37 Thus religion uses poetic discourse to reach, instead, toward the limit-expressions that converge around divinity: Ricoeur claims
32 As Ricoeur himself aptly writes: “This subtle equilibrium between the iconoclastic virtualities of proclamation and the symbolic resurgence of the sacred has expressed itself throughout the history of Christianity as a dialectic of preaching and sacrament.” Ricoeur, 61–67. 33 Ricoeur, 58. 34 Ricoeur, 58. 35 Ricoeur, 58. 36 Ricoeur, 58. 37 Ricoeur, 49.
24 that Christ’s hyperbole eventually culminates in the limit-expression “Kingdom of God.”38
Presumably, ordinary poetic language, which lacks such limit expressions, would be simply redescriptive. So religious poetic discourse might seem to differ from poetic discourse proper in that it does not simply attempt to indirectly convey a more numinous reality, as in the thinking of
Eliade, but instead seems to be a language that seeks to transform elements of mundane reality itself through opening new meaning and understanding. But of course, Ricoeur thinks that all poetic discourse begins to bring about, or at least expand, new possibilities of being, too.
There is no reason, here, to suspect that general manifestation would differ from religious manifestation in the case of redescription if the only difference in the language used to describe them was whether that language had a limit-expression or not. Both religious and nonreligious manifestation get redescribed, and that rediscription matters. We should expect poetic discourse of every kind to open up new possibilities for that which manifests. From reading “Manifestation and Proclamation,” it should be clear that Ricoeurian manifestation seems bound to language wherever it occurs. Ricoeur’s suggestion that manifestation is immediately enmeshed in a dialectic with proclamation is, for those interested in metaphor, quite intriguing in its own right.
For if there is any manifestation that surely transcends the telling of it, we would expect this to be that manifestation of the sacred which, as such, transcends the capacities of language. Other, more mundane manifestations, being in and of this world of language, would have much less reason to be immune to the strictures of proclamation. So we might fairly say that Ricoeurians would expect the same linguisticality that applies to religious manifestation to hold for manifestation generally.39
38 Ricoeur, 58. 39 It may be interesting to readers of Levinas that Ricoeur himself sets up proclamation and manifestation antithetically, as two poles of one reality, where one counterbalances the other. This is not, of course, the only
25 We have learned from Rioceur’s “Manifestation and Proclamation” that manifestation is not the simple presentation of being. Language shapes the intelligibility of manifestation, and therefore some of manifestation itself. Manifestation, after all, requires and becomes wrapped up in the mind of a manifestee. Thus, manifestation seems to be the instantiation or realization of being through intelligible means. Without language, even language of an entirely novel kind, there seems to be no manifestation in any meaningful sense at all. More, the language of the manifestation shapes the manifestation itself; in the case of religious manifestation, the “limit- expressions” of religious discourse present an ordinary world transformed or transfigured by the divine.
This linking of manifestation to linguistic intelligibility is entirely consonant with how
Ricoeur speaks of manifestation in the Rule of Metaphor. Concerning Aristotle’s understanding of lexis, word choice, he writes:
In this case, lexis would rather be one kind of manifestation of thinking, linked to any kind of instruction (didaskalia): ‘The way in which a thing is said does affect its intelligibility [pros to dêlôsai]’ (1404 a 9–10). When the proof itself is the only thing of importance, we do not bother about lexis; but as soon as the relationship to our hearer comes to the foreground, it is through our lexis that we teach.40
Later, he adds:
To the degree that style is the external manifestation of discourse, it tends to separate the concern to ‘please’ from that of ‘arguing’ and...drawing these three traits together – arrangement of the verses, interpretation by words, manifestation in language – we see the function of lexis taking shape as that which exteriorizes and makes explicit the internal order of muthos. We might even say that there is a relationship between the muthos of tragedy and its lexis like that between interior and exterior form.41
conceptual possibility. In setting up the proclamation of sacred manifestation to somehow weigh against the manifestation itself, Ricoeur broadly agrees with Levinas’s famous dichotomy between the saying and the said. 40 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 31. 41 Ricoeur, 37.
26 The language of being affects the manifestation of being. Being, we might say, manifests in the same way a sentence unfolds. The world worlds, if we recall Heidegger’s memorable phrase,42 as well as his other adage that “language is the house of Being.”43 Ricoeur would, perhaps, summarize this sentiment by saying that the world worlds in words.
1.4. Riceour’s reading of Heidegger reveals that metaphor casts being as poets do, opening possibilities of being that philosophy has not historically considered, and that are bound to the unfolding possibilities of language Heidegger’s influence upon Ricoeur extends throughout Ricoeur’s period of
“hermeneutic philosophy.” We refer here to the time of about twenty years, beginning with
Freud and Philosophy and continuing through Oneself as Another, during which Ricoeur focuses on areas of hermeneutical importance: symbolism, psychology, language, and textual interpretation, all of which culminates in a new understanding of the self. So we should not be surprised that much of what Ricoeur has to say about truth echoes Heidegger’s hermeneutical concern with being’s appearance, or manifestation, even as he continues to extend fundamentally
Aristotelian themes.
Perhaps Ricoeur’s most Heideggerian extension of Aristotle comes when he asserts that
Aristotle’s very language leads him to make a crucial discovery. The moment of Aristotle’s discovery comes in his Metaphysics, where he notes there are four meanings of “being” that are non-decomposable: accidental being, being in itself, being as truth, and being as falsehood.44
42 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 23. 43 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Global Religious Vision 1, no. 1 (2000): 83–109. 44 Lorenzo Altieri, “Moses at the Threshold of Canaan: The Incomplete Ontology of Paul Ricoeur,” Between Suspicion and Empathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 31. Likely referring to Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W.D. Ross, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, The Modern Library Classics, Paperback Edition. (New York: Random House, 2001),1015a20- 1018b5.
27 Ricoeur notes that Aristotle’s observation occurs in, and presumably because of, the dictionary of philosophical terms that he consults.45 While this insight seems to simply agree with
Aristotle’s observation that being enters our awareness through language,46 when we join this insight to Ricoeur’s observations about the polysemy of language and Heidegger’s accounting of being’s entanglement with language, we begin to see the theoretical foundation that leads
Ricoeur to declare that being is said in several ways.47 Moreover, because the polysemy of being orders a polysemy of predication, our categories of thinking are really categories of language in disguise.48 Ricoeur’s conclusion is that just as language leads Aristotle to a discovery, so does the metaphor lead us to discover new properties of the portrayed.
For Ricoeur, the discovery of new properties in whatever metaphor describes occurs while that which is manifested extends the possibilities of being. Here, Ricouer does depart from
Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s supposition that “the metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical”49 – that the figurative sense and the proper sense of metaphor in some way shadow the visible and invisible of metaphysics. But there does not seem to be, for Ricoeur, a strict separation between metaphor’s two senses in the first place. There is, instead, extension as the figurative sense of metaphor expands its meanings beyond the possibilities of the proper sense. Being appears to us as described. Further, in Ricoeur’s understanding, metaphor may even supersede metaphysics and reverse Heidegger’s phrasing: being itself may be metaphorical.50
45 Altieri, 34. 46 Lorenzo Altieri, “Moses at the Threshold of Canaan: The Incomplete Ontology of Paul Ricoeur,” in Between Suspicion and Empathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 31. 47 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 260. 48 Ricoeur, 261. 49 Ricoeur, 280. 50 Domenico Jervolino, “Metaphor and Philosophical Discourse,” in Metaphors, ed. Stefano Arduini (Rome: Edizioni Di Storia E Letteratura, 2007), 50.
28 Ricoeur supports his assertion of the metaphoricity of being through a comparison of the traditions of philosophy and poetry: while philosophy has understood being in terms of the union of being, poets have understood being more fluidly and paradoxically. This is because philosophers use the analogy of being to unite the various meanings of “being,” while the poets use metaphor, that is, the tension within multiplicity itself, to describe the world, and make no project of uniting being at all. This leads philosophy in the line of Aristotle to show that all things in some sense participate in being, while poets in the line of Homer seek to show that all things both are and are not. The result of such differing language has been a differing understanding of being. By introducing the trope of the possible into philosophy through metaphor, Ricoeur seems to be trying to bridge this gap.
Charles Taylor provides a helpful way to think of the impact of language on ontology. He notes that whether or not language can be purely descriptive for simple objects, it is an equal task of language to refer to reflective states, to emotions and sentiments, which also surely exist.51
Yet when language refers to them, it must also alter them, as new expressions by their nature change reflective realities. As readers of Ricoeur, we might point to this being a point where, as
Ricoeur writes, “the creative dimension of language is consonant with the creative aspects of reality itself.”52
Because Ricoeur so links expression and predication, Ricoeur accords with the
Aristotelian notion that metaphor cannot simply replace the noun. Instead, metaphor enlivens or quickens the noun by depicting it as if in a state of activity.53 That is, it presents a scene – it
51 Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, 35–36. 52 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 254. 53 Ricoeur, 34. Ricoeur refers here to 1411b 24-25 of the Rhetoric. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans., George A. Kennedy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
29 makes the hearer see things. Strictly speaking, metaphor cannot replace a noun, because it acts as
– and most often is – a sentence.54 To return to our previous example of the little boy comparing his mother to a fish, we might say that the verbal link between the terms – “is” – not only connects the mother and fish as objects in the world but also as contemporaneous. Naturally, this contemporaneity too has implications because, if the case of The Rule of Metaphor is correct, then being, particularly if manifest through language (metaphor) cannot be unchanging.
By giving a tense to all of its terms, metaphor has also revealed itself to be something quite interesting: an event, something that happens to its words when placed in a sentence. The mother and fish share the same time, the present, a tie which in this case evokes particular poignancy and meaning, as the death of the mother and the fish means that they “are” both no longer technically anything at all – at least, not anything but dead. Within the space of the metaphor, death is present for both us and the boy. We thus have a clear case of metaphor giving tense to all its terms, by the shape of its structure as a sentence. And, according to the linguisticality of the being-for-consciousness that is manifestation, if there is any being involved at all in such a sentence, it too is going to be an event.55
Metaphor, by the logic of manifestation, places truth at the level of the sentence-event.56
The broader notion of truth introduced by Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor suits the broader notion of Being introduced by Heidegger. Similarly, manifestation expands the number and kinds of meaning that metaphor allows its auditors to understand. In each case, plurality and temporality define truth less as verification and more as an event. As Ricoeur directly states, “it is in experiences more fundamental than any onto-theological articulation that I will seek the features
54 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 5. 55 Ricoeur, 98. 56 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, 11th ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 21.
30 of a truth capable of being spoken of in terms of manifestation rather than verification.”57
Because being is broadly manifest, it can also be widely witnessed.
Ricoeur’s point that in manifestation, both language and being, as they unfold in space and time, imply witnesses, is a crucial point. Though Ricoeur clearly means to distinguish manifestation from any sort of adequation as a means of discovery, when he does so he assumes a certain intelligibility: “a truth capable of being spoken of.” The question of intelligibility implies intelligence, much as presentation implies a perception and perceiver. Without witness there is no truth, for without witnesses there is nothing told. In this way, language in its metaphoricity coincides with being in its appearance. As witnessed, both being and language create worlds-for-auditors. Most significantly for Ricoeur, they create worlds-in-time or world- events. Ricoeur speaks of the life-world of the metaphor.58 Both rhetor and auditor enter this world that is larger than either one of them.
The living, unfolding worlds of being and metaphor surpass their witnesses. No person can comprehend the totality of being; neither rhetor nor auditor can delimit all the meanings of a metaphor at once. To witness or create is to suffer, to experience the finite nature of encountering something exterior to one’s own self. In the newness of being unfolded through the truth of metaphoric language, we encounter our own limits. Ricoeur notes, quite naturally, that this is also an opportunity for growth.59 We are challenged to respond and change. When we encounter metaphoric language, when we confront new truth, the being that we grow is also our own, in the process of imagination and discovery.
57 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics: Writing and Lectures (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 132. 58 Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 84. 59 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 199.
31 1.5. Unfolding being through the possibilities of metaphor opens a journey of trust rather than certitude, but if we follow its course we may discover – in discourse – a whole new world of truth
Manifestation opens up truth as the world of the text or the space of a metaphor, a realm into which one might cognitively enter. Language is thoroughly engaged in being and its manifestation. Yet that is only half the journey of hermeneutics into truth. We must also account for the use of language by those who witness states of affairs and attest to them, even if they will begin in the same place as those who are spoken to. As Ricoeur again writes, “‘I hope I am within the bounds of truth’ means a proposition of truth which is not a term or horizon but a milieu like air or light.”60 This is true no less for the rhetor than it is for the auditor, and no less for philosophical propositions than for metaphor. The truth to which witnesses will speak becomes a world unfolding in possibility actualized through language. The presentation of being and our comprehension of being seem like two sides of truth.
We may encapsulate the two “sides” of truth as manifestation and attestation. We take the term attestation from Ricoeur himself in Time and Narrative, where he uses it to describe the self’s assurance of its identity through time – that is, our implicit trust that the actions we take will be our own.61 Later, he will also use it in Memory, History, and Forgetting to convey the self’s participatory sense as a witness of unfolding history.62 Both senses, we believe, convey attestation as the subject’s capacity to “initiate something new and imputable to itself” and yet remain itself.63 Because of attestation, the self can explore, undergo, and suffer through trust, rather than certitude.64 Indeed, attestation sharply contrasts with verification or adequation as a
60 Ricoeur, History and Truth, 54. 61 Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 62 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 66. 63 Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 64 Dauenhauer and Pellauer.
32 way of knowing the world. Experience, suffering, and change all become part of attestation’s meaning, especially in the context of history.
Attestation in the case of metaphor means that, in choosing, any would-be master of language will be put off-balance or off-center. Metaphorical attestation places the rhetor in the same place with regard to the metaphor as narrative attestation does in regard to the story or event. One cannot make a metaphor without participating in it. Whereas sentences are texts in miniature,65 and there is a “world of the text,”66 then there must be a “world-let” in metaphor where author and audience share a set of common possible meanings. Rhetors enter this conceptual space whenever they eschew a term’s dictionary definition and cast about until they hit upon an appropriate, relating amplification. Given metaphor’s “is and is-not quality,” this comes as a surprise, a moment of new insight.67 In its most common sense, to attest to something is to speak for a reality while speaking from it, and a similar sense seems to apply to metaphor, as one cannot craft metaphor without experiencing its shock. We can well imagine the surprise of
Faulkner’s boy articulating his realization for the first time: his mother, like the fish, is dead.
While much of what Ricoeur says about attestation as the other key aspect of truth comes after The Rule of Metaphor, he introduces its key elements earlier – and extends its trajectory much later. One of these elements must certainly be the placement and limitation of the self as an agent of disclosure. Ricoeur describes the opacity and de-centering of the human subject already in Freud and Philosophy: “this [subject] is not the cogito that possesses itself, but sees its original truth in and through the avowals of inadequacy, illusion, and the lying of false consciousness.”68 At the same time, a kind of truth rather than the immediate is possible: “the
65 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 94. 66 Ricoeur, 93. 67 Ricoeur, 281. 68 Ricoeur, 439.
33 Oedipus complex inherits all the spiritual overtones of the process of truth: curiosity, resistance, pride, distress, wisdom.”69
Both the surprise of the subject and the paradoxical expansion of the self’s understanding as it witnesses unfolding events together make the Ricoeurian attestation of truth possible. As he writes, “truth as manifestation – and in this sense as revelation – demands the real recognition of our real dependence.”70 As he writes of the contribution of psychoanalysis: “There is thus opened up a clearing of truthfulness in which ideals and idols (of desire) are brought to light and…unmasked.”71 Though the self is no longer sole master of itself, the human can be expanded and enriched through witness as it steps into the realm of truth through discourse. As
Charles Kelby has written of Ricoeur’s work overall: “Truth is that in which we continually move toward self-clarification.”72 Moreover, Ricoeur himself has written: “We shall learn from anguish only if we try to understand it and if, by understanding it, we reestablish contact with the fount of truth and of life which nurtures our rejoinders to anguish.”73
That we encounter truth as a world we enter into, rather than as a point we propose, implies that the self will be surprised by that truth at some point in the telling of it – otherwise, there would be no discovery. Indeed, the expansion of human knowledge through attestation is possible precisely because of the de-centering of the self. This is immediately, though indirectly, evident in the introduction to The Rule of Metaphor. There, Ricoeur notes that Aristotle is not wrong when he claims that metaphor is the transposition of the name. But, at the same time, metaphor is the tension between the frame of the sentence and focus of the word – instead of the
69 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 519. 70 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 134. 71 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 280. 72 Paul Ricoeur, “Introduction,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xvii. 73 Ricoeur, History and Truth, 287.
34 difference between the metaphor’s two terms, as Aristotle believed. Metaphor is deceptive because it focuses on the word but relies upon the sentence. This “deception” will later become very much like that enacted between sense and reference in structuralism: when demanding the reference, we often overlook the sense of sentential statements that reference requires.74
Metaphor works precisely because it tricks us, throwing us off balance, providing the difficulty that makes growth possible.
Instead of a new name, metaphor presents a new scene that redirects our own thoughts and feelings. It is the realization of our error of first attending to metaphor’s proper sense that opens our understanding. We expect metaphor to simply rename, but we find instead that the charged affect of a phrase transcends mere grammar in order to convey connotation, mood, and tone. The suspension of the reference “is the negative condition of a more fundamental mode of reference” that opens up into far broader fields.75
Metaphor thus begins a long chain of Ricoeur’s thinking about discourse. The metaphor unfolds into the sentence, the sentence unfolds into the text, which opens up in turn to the context that is the world. The parallel occurs in time: the instant becomes the event and the event becomes experience, even as experience expands into a narrative and eventually into history. In every case, new knowledge depends upon the suspension of original reference. “Metaphorical truth,” writes Ricoeur, “is tensional” and it is indeed the very meaning of the words “reality” and
“truth” that are at stake.76 For him, “the concepts of ‘truth’, ‘reality’, and ‘being’ have to be reworked in order to respond to the semantic claim of metaphorical utterance.”77
74 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 217. 75 Ricoeur, 6. 76 Ricoeur, 229. 77 Ricoeur, 259.
35 Metaphor not only manifests new meaning but also new truth. Its trick is by no means empty. Metaphor is fundamental to Ricoeur’s understanding of the manifestation that brings forth the ontology beneath his hermeneutics. All discourse, says Ricoeur, says something about something78; interpretation has real content and addresses some reality, some sache. Something must be in order for something to be said.79 But metaphor, as a poetic form of discourse, amplifies this rule. In metaphor, writes Ricoeur, being-as is seeing-as.80 Metaphor manifests new meaning because it allows us to understand new truth. And if the end of metaphor’s vitality is the death of becoming an addition to a dictionary, then even in this case new truth has been created precisely by appearing. Indeed, as Ricoeur famously writes, “nothing is obtained from the world except imagery unchained by meaning.”81 Ricoeur argues that metaphor aspires to truth because it conveys new information and is not merely ornamental.82 Metaphor makes real reference – and also extends it.
1.6. Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor presents the poet as a genius perceiving previously unseen similarity within difference, but also presents the poet as a rhetor speaking to a public audience
The Rule of Metaphor broaches several themes that, we believe, warrant further exploration. First is the notion of polysemy, wherein metaphors mean several possible things, rather than only one certain thing. This perfectly suits metaphor from the view of the audience who discovers those meanings through iterative readings. But it may also be possible to understand metaphor from the point of view of the poet, in which case it should also matter that a
78 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 48. 79 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 304. 80 Paul Ricoeur, “Autobiography,” in The Philosphy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hanh, The Library of Living Philosophers 22 (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1998), 28. 81 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 210. 82 Ricoeur, 222.
36 metaphor means several possible things, rather than anything at all. Indeed, it is because metaphors are chosen to mean a particular array of things that they have their rhetorical effect.
This remains true as we shift from understanding metaphor from the point of view of its audience to considering the point of view of its creators – a move which Ricoeur makes possible, even though he does not emphasize it as he focuses on the audience’s perspective. But from the point of view of a metaphor’s creators, it matters that metaphors are chosen and selected. We have mentioned already that the meanings of a metaphor surpass their author’s original intent, and lauded that excess. But it seems we ought to make sense, too, of that intent itself, the originating choice. After all, if a metaphor could mean anything at all, then it would mean nothing whatsoever. It would be interchangeable with any other metaphor.
In their polysemic vitality, metaphors are like poems, which famously elude any one narrow interpretation. The assumption behind the search for the “author’s intent,” however, insists that exactly the opposite is true for the poem – or metaphor – as the author crafts it: the author could have only ever intended one meaning. Yet there is no reason to suppose that we should expect poems to possess many meanings as read, while insisting that poets only be able to think of one while writing. And there is every reason to expect differently, as writers often find their process to be one of ongoing discovery. Poets unlock new meanings for themselves as well as for their audience – every poet is, in some sense, his or her own first reader. Thus, the break between the time when a poet is writing or re-writing a verse and the time when a reader reads a work is not definite. Many an author has had the experience of a reader telling them something true about their own work that they did not know.
The process of creating metaphors opens up new truth, unfolds truth as if into three dimensions, for the author of a metaphor as much as for its audience. Philosophy has sought to
37 account for this by several different means. Historically, Aristotle first tried to account for a metaphor’s novelty in reference to taxonomy: one simply comes to see a classification which was not apparent before. Ricoeur, following him, emphasizes the poet’s discovery most heavily in his characterization of the poet, the maker of metaphor, as an Aristotelian genius, as one who perceives a similarity where others have not.
Ricoeur’s exploration of the poet as genius is a second theme that he broaches within The
Rule of Metaphor that warrants further exploration. Ricoeur introduces the concept of the genius of metaphor early in The Rule of Metaphor, as he quotes Aristotle:
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor [literally: to be metaphorical, to metaphorik on einai]. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius [euphuias], since a good metaphor [literally: to metaphorize well, eu metaphérein] implies an intuitive perception of the similarity [to homoion theôrein] in dissimilars’83
In other words, the similarity between two things must already really be there, and yet the difference must never be forgotten. The passivity of genius before an actual relationship, for
Ricoeur, is the very originating moment of metaphor – although this passivity is also accompanied by its opposite in Ricoeur’s characterization of the poet as geometer, as one who actively connects two points that are necessarily distant (or, in the case of metaphor, two objects that are conceptually distinct.)84 In this way, Riceour maintains Aristotelian natural categories, which must be both crossed and respected for metaphor to work. This culminates in Ricoeur’s
83 Ricoeur, 23. Referring to Poetics 1459a3-8, though not the same edition as “Poetics,” trans. Ingram Bywater. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. ed. Richard McKeon, The Modern Library Classics Paperback Edition, (New York: The Modern Library, 2001.) 84 “There is no epiphor without diaphor, no intuition without construction…. There is no contradiction, therefore, in giving an account of metaphor now in the language of apperception, that is, of vision, and then in the language of construction. It is at once the ‘gift of genius’ and the skill of the geometer.” Ricoeur, 195.
38 notion of the copula, the “is and is not” of metaphor. One term of a metaphor both is and is not like the other.
Yet instead of looking for metaphor’s genesis in its simple descriptive power, why not look for genesis in metaphor’s most ultimately salient feature, its structure as a unit of speech?
For there are reasons to question Aristotle’s account of the genius and the geometer. After all,
Ricoeur himself has said that the most salient thing about metaphor is not that it compares two terms in Aristotelian fashion, but that it is a sentence. And he faults rhetorical history for pursuing metaphor’s comparison rather than its grammatical structure, thus landing in the area of
Aristotelian taxonomy, leading it to languish, ultimately, in the understanding of metaphor as ornament. Yet, by Ricoeur’s own account, in making a metaphor one seeks, ultimately, not to compare two things but to persuade another person of the comparison so made: to create an event that can be shared. Metaphor is, strictly speaking, an attempt to bias the perception of another toward something that is not apparent at first blush.
Were Ricoeur to establish metaphor’s origin within its structure as a particular kind of event-creating sentence, he may have realized the deeper error of Aristotelian taxonomy, and thus of Aristotle’s emphasis on genius: the process of perception itself is not passive.
Contemporary science tells us that our most basic perceptions are biased, limited both by what we are feeling at the time and by what we have perceived before. One sits in a room and does not smell the odor to which one has become accustomed. The raw sense data exists, but the perception which registers as smell does not. We might understand metaphor as one attempt to direct attention to something that was not apparent before, and not within a particular audience’s current understanding. Metaphor would be, then, a lie that did not intend to deceive, and a bias that revealed truth rather than concealing it: a public event.
39 Metaphor is, like poetry, discourse: someone saying something to someone about something. No poet is an island, entire to his or her own self. Ricoeur rightly places metaphor in the marketplace. And it is in the marketplace that metaphors are bought and sold. Metaphor, like other techne, is product as well as process, the artifactual nexus of a private practice entering the public realm. What is discourse without an audience? Surely Ricoeur does not intend for metaphor to be reflection alone. The joy of poetry is not only the thrill of discovery, but the pleasure of sharing that discovery, of seeing someone else make the “same” connection. One would have to have this shared experience in mind from the very moment of searching for the most “suitable” metaphor, or else one would not choose it. Suitable for whom, we ask? Surely not only for oneself.
If this attunement between a metaphor and its intended audience holds, then the originating tension of the metaphor would lie not only in the difference between its two terms but also in the organization of its creation as a sentence addressed to someone about something. The metaphor reveals something that we understand but which we believe others yet do not. This disjoint between private perception and public persuasion is not only ornamental, but drives metaphor in the very moment of its origin. We can see this telos in the process of artistic creation itself. One does not learn art solely from studying the world but also from following other artists.
Poets read other poets. Craftsmen learn their trade from practicing with masters. What is learned from others is sensibility, a particular way of perceiving and rendering the world that is both embraced and eventually overcome by one’s own vision, then presented to the public. The geometer and genius, even if we keep those analogical categories, both require a tutor. This interpersonal fact of metaphor cannot be ignored. The Ricoeurian account of metaphor is
40 incomplete, insofar as it accepts Aristotle’s assumption that metaphors rely on intuitive genius rather than learnable craft.
1.7. Public rhetors will not simply perceive the inherent similarity between two things but will also select the metaphor most suited to produce the most plausible meanings.
Clearly, the attention and care a rhetor takes when making a metaphor weighs in its efficacy, use, and meaning. Not just any old metaphor will do, and someone must do the choosing. We should clarify, then, what becomes somewhat obscured in Ricoeur’s larger corpus: the role of the rhetor in metaphorical use, specifically. Here, there is less authorial disappearance
“behind the text.” Rather, the maker of a metaphor must “craft” the connection between the terms, or the metaphor might misfire, or die prematurely. Ricoeur does gesture toward this in his account of the “genius” of metaphorical insight,85 and the power of rhetors to unleash new meaning through keen metaphorical use.86 Thus it cannot be that only the reader or audience makes a metaphor “work.”
Someone must choose a metaphor because metaphors cannot and do not mean only one thing. Remember, the moment speaker and audience agree on the meaning of a metaphor, its denotative reduction begins. Living metaphors mean many things. The best metaphors surprise us more than once. We would find, for example, that in the reiterations of readings of a poem, that its metaphors would almost never strike one precisely the same way on subsequent readings, though they may not always strike true. If Gadamer is correct that reading an entire text is a
85 Ricoeur, 27. 86 Tellingly, Ricoeur never contradicts Aristotle’s assertion that the genius of metaphor is “unteachable.” Presumably, there are some parts of it that are not learnable, not controllable, and this will play into Ricoeur’s larger theory of truth later on.
41 performance,87 then there is no reason to suspect that metaphor should not also produce smaller versions of the same finite, fecund, and fruitful iteration. Many readings of a metaphor would then ensue, with many lively meanings springing forth in temporal succession.
Now there is a question here as to how to determine precisely what meanings a metaphor might have, since metaphors must have many meanings to live, but surely cannot have all meanings lest they mean nothing. After all, on the other side of the spectrum from the death of metaphor would be its vacuity, literal non-sense, words that could mean anything. So we have every reason to suspect that rhetors will select the potential meanings of a metaphor much as auditors do. Yet we fear we will find no easy answer to this question in Ricoeur. For all his effective eschewing of philosophical valuations of metaphor, Ricoeur writes surprisingly little of aesthetic valuations of metaphor or metaphor’s interpretations. That is, he talks often about whether or not a metaphor lives, but rarely about whether or not a metaphor is apt, or appropriate.88
This lacuna seems a strange omission. Clearly, there is more than a little selection on the attesting or speaking side of metaphor and metaphoric truth. We can see this in the process by which much poetic craft occurs, as rhetors proceed through a succession of drafts which introduce and discard, among other things, varying metaphors. After all, “my mother is a fish,” may be a masterful metaphor in its context but “her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a
87 “Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 1984), 153. 88 Ricoeur mentions the good metaphor only once, in the Rule of Metaphor, as the intuitive grasp of similarity in dissimilar, and gives no description of this quality. His source, Aristotle, however, elaborates several measures. “There are inappropriate metaphors, some because they are laughable (comic poets, too, use metaphor, some because too lofty and tragic.) And they are inappropriate if far-fetched….” Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1406b5- 1406b7.Thus, Ricoeur drops the critical discussion of what makes for an appropriate or apt metaphor from the conversation. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 25.
42 sneeze” is awkward no matter its environment.89 Indeed, one can understand even a poem by chaptering the history of its revisions, its changing metaphors, and their shifting context and meaning – a valuable exercise for any young poet. Indeed, so long as the work continues, the poem lives, although publication might be considered the death of a poem to its author. In this matter of polysemy, the ability of a poet to revisit his work mirrors the ability of an auditor to revisit the metaphor she has heard.
Both rhetor and audience step into the space of the metaphor, and in Ricoeur’s understanding, they do so on essentially equal footing. No matter the angle of approach, any selection of metaphor will properly be a surprising, provisional, and invitational affair. Metaphor is an event that requires both participants, just as it requires both terms, and we cannot truly speak of either the death of an author or the tyranny of a reader’s response. Metaphor requires both rhetor and audience, and in metaphor, each requires the other to produce lively meaning.
1.8. Ricoeur’s suggestion that rhetors select their metaphors arbitrarily after the fashion of “the geometer” when they do not do so by way of passive genius ignores the better possibility: metaphor is a craft that can be learned from others
Ricoeur’s possible underselling of the role that authors play in the crafting of metaphor may come about because of his understanding of Aristotelian genius. He describes the genius of metaphor very early, in his first chapter of The Rule of Metpahor, “Between Rhetoric and
Poetics: Aristotle,” where he notes that there are several important points in what will become, for him, a heavily significant passage.90 Along with other points that Ricoeur makes about metaphor being a process, a verb, and the possibility of that process going well or poorly, he
89 Various, “The Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay,” The Washington Post Style Invitational, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.etni.org.il/farside/analogies.htm. 90 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 25.
43 emphasizes that the process cannot be taught, because it is a gift of nature. It depends not on the ability within the person but finally on the real likeness extant in the world. From this third point follows the fourth, that the process of metaphor is the process of seeing the real likenesses extant in the world. It is not the process of creating or imputing similarities, but rather of simply perceiving them.91
Yet Ricoeur does add to Aristotle’s understanding, adopting the term diaphor from the theorist Phillip Wheelwright. Diaphor is the creation of meaning through absurd juxtaposition alone.92 Yet for Ricoeur, “metaphor is the tension between diaphor and epiphor.”93 That is, it is the tension between intuition, in the figure of the genius, and construction, in the figure of the geometer. This is the understanding Ricoeur has established when he returns to the issue in the sixth chapter of The Rule of Metaphor. When he says that epiphora is “this glance and genius stroke,” he means that the Aristotelian metaphor for metaphor is one of movement, phora from one location to another. Perception involves motion, in this case receiving the impression of outward objects that suddenly seem “nearer” each other in conceptual space. It is this similarity as sensed proximity, this passivity of perception, that Aristotle names “genius.” Yet the geometer does not rely on pre-existing similarities of the objects in the world, but rather attempts to create them. Metaphors as Ricoeur understands them rely not only on the ocular “discovery” of extant similarities between objects in the world but also depend on the “manipulation” of the one who
91 Said most clearly by Aristotle as he concludes his explanation of the similar and dissimilar: “Thus, if we assign as the genus that which is common to all the cases, our definition will not be regarded as unsuitable. Those who deal in definitions usually form them on this principle; for they say that the unit is the starting-point of number and the point the starting-point of a line; it is obvious, therefore, that they assign genus to that which is common to both. Such, then, are the means by which reasonings are carried out.” Aristotle, “Topics,” trans. W.A. Packard-Cambridge in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, The Modern Library Classics, Paperback Edition. (New York: Random House, 2001)108b30. 92 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 295–96. 93 Ricoeur, 296.
44 makes the metaphor. It goes both ways. Both the genius and the geometer play their part. There is no genius intuition that does not have with it the geometer’s construction, or vice versa.
A rhetor’s moving a metaphor’s objects together despite their real differences accounts for metaphor’s subversion beneath the copula of “is” and “is not.” Thus the metaphor yields,
Ricoeur writes, while protesting.94 The likeness must to us seem absurd, at least at first.
Metaphor cannot reference only the literal similarity, or it becomes a different form of speech.
The fact that metaphor moves the similar things together must mean that they are first further apart in conceptual space.
So go Ricoeur’s distinctions concerning the tensive elements of metaphor. Though structurally interesting, we are not convinced that they make a difference in experience. First, it is not plain that juxtapositions made in absurdity, so far as the poet or reader is concerned, may not also have real similarity in the actual world. After all, no creation comes from nothing.
Indeed, such a process simply sounds like an exaggerated, less careful form of discovery. Both the patient cartographer and the captain of the storm-tossed ship may well find “new” continents; one will simply be more surprised than the other to stand on solid ground.
Conversely, because of the real and recognized limits of analogy, which Ricoeur himself elaborates at some length in the book’s final chapter,95 even the least astonishing comparison will remain at some level absurd. A metaphor is nothing if not the deliberate manipulation of language; every juxtaposition is also at least somewhat erratic. So not only can all active geometers turn out to be geniuses, all passive geniuses contain within them geometers by
94 Ricoeur, 231. 95 Ricoeur, 305–22.
45 necessity. Thus, though we would agree that both the geometer and the genius seem present in the metaphorical process, their roles seem to us less than entirely distinct.
Second, we are not entirely convinced that the Aristotelian description of metaphor as process only is entirely correct. It seems to us inescapable that makers of metaphor do traffic in a certain product, and that the actuality of that product matters. Buyers of pottery would doubtless be disappointed if they were only sold the perfected artisanal process. Likewise, metaphor produces something real, a “new” connection that fundamentally matters, and which can be weak or strong, helpful or hurtful, illuminating or obscuring, of the truth. And again, where Aristotle notes the differing levels of quality of metaphor, Ricoeur drops this discussion almost entirely.
He does not continue Aristotle’s discussion of the metaphor’s aesthetic materials, its fitting or unfitting tone, its poor or excellent taste. Indeed, when we say that a metaphor is weak or inappropriate, we do not mean to say that the process of making it was faulty, we mean that the product itself is. The product itself seems a significant part of any process. Indeed, the products of metaphor, or any art, make it distinct. A poet does not sit down with his scrolls and sculpt a pot, and weavers produce few poems at their looms. Metaphor is not only seeing, but a very particular kind of seeing, and we can see that in its very particular kind of product.
Third, and most important, we are not convinced that perception is entirely passive in the way that Aristotle seems to say, and in the sense that Ricoeur carries forward. That is, perception is not the pure reception of sensible forms. Rather, perception is the selective reception of sensible forms; perception may even play in the very formation of these forms. We do not “see” the vast amount of light that illuminates the world, nor all the objects within our field of vision.
Whatever we see, we see by interpretation, selection, and juxtaposition due to causes besides the qualities of the objects of the world. Again, one wonders how much the order of operations in the
46 rhetorical process matters. Do the geometer and the genius work at the same “time?” Or does the geometer deliberately draw things nearer so that the genius can suddenly see the similarity?
Certainly the latter seems more in accord with contemporary scientific findings, which indicate that all manner of things bias even the raw facts of our perception – and which findings we will address in a later chapter. Suffice it to say for now that we sense not first by dint of the qualities of the things we perceive, but first by the qualities of our current inclinations. Again, this is not to say that correlations cannot exist between objects in the world, any more than it is to say that such objects do not exist. That much is undeniable, or no metaphors would work, or they all would work equally well. But it is to suggest that the presence of such similarities is not why we first see them. We see them because someone has directed our attention toward them.
So one concern with Riceour’s appropriation of Aristotle here seems to be that it remains epistemically naïve. There may be no logical contradiction between having both genius and geometry operant in metaphor, but it creates a picture of perception tidier and more balanced than contemporary understanding suggests. Rather, we might say that in the matter of both perception and production of metaphor, the geometer in a sense allows the genius to go about his business, and this is no slight to the genius. It is simply the most complete picture that we have of perception.
This picture can work to our advantage. Selective passivity can be taught. When poets teach other poets, the didactic is not lists of kinds of speech. It is, primarily and above all else, a way of looking at the world, an initiation into a particular sensibility. When one learns to write poetry, and make one’s metaphors, one learns one’s own way of looking at the world – by seeing the way that other poets do. It is only then that writers and poets find their own “voice.” This is different from being trained to observe the world, in the manner of a scientist. To see the world
47 only as it is, as if from nowhere, is the death of poetry, just as seeing it only as many others see it is the birth of cliché. Rather, one must see as one’s own self, uniquely and expressively, with all one’s biases and emphases – biases and emphases that are granted, in so many cases, by others.
Indeed, we learn to perceive by imitating the perception of others.96 That we do not approach the world in the passivity of Aristotelian genius does not mean that we must accept the
Platonic suspicion that our senses are unreliable and the conviction that we see via the light emitted by our eyes. Because we do neither of these things! Sight is not only visual but also attentive, perceived not only through the eyes but also through the mind, which we must cultivate. So we look where our parents look. Our eyes go where others direct our attention, or react when others draw attention to themselves. We play visual games like peekaboo and hide- and-seek. Social, visual exploration allows us not only to understand what we see, and to know that we see it, but also leads us to omit what does not seem important enough for our attention.
We learn how to use our eyes. Our senses become reliable precisely because we rely on the sensibility of others.
So the difference between the geometer and the genius which matters so much to Ricoeur seems to matter less than the other person “in the room” so to speak, the didaskalos, the master who instructs them both, providing both the genius’s realization and the geometer’s imagination.
In making a metaphor, one need neither accept the literal likenesses nor dare the arbitrary choice
– or even try some felicitous balance of the two. One need not do any of these things because both reception and juxtaposition need to be taught and learned, and can be. Neither perfectly determined nor utterly irrational, both can become reliable. The result of this education is
96 Famously, Americans tend to only see the biggest fish in an aquarium, while Asians describe all the fish, the plants, and rocks on the bottom of the tank. Lea Winerman, “The Culture-Cognition Connection,” Monitor on Psychology 37, no. 2 (February 2006): 64.
48 metaphors that are uniquely our own, and also simultaneously offered to the public. Because others have taught us to see, we see in our own way. And because others have taught us to speak, we speak in words unique to us, that others nonetheless can understand. Artisans, we produce pots that anyone might use, but which bear our own mark and seal.
Thus, the tension that matters in the creation of metaphor need not only be the tension between the absurd and the extant, but could also be the tension between the personal and the public. This latter tension might square better with other elements of Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor as rhetoric. After all, poetry, struggling for universality, remains the most idiosyncratic of forms. If the work is not to be derivative, the association of meanings that constitutes the world of the poem must begin in the mind of the poet alone. Yet at the same time, if the poem is to be understood, that world of meaning must be opened up and shared in an intelligible way. Is this not also the case for Ricoeur’s world-let of metaphor, the space into which both rhetor and audience walk, but which the rhetor must first open up?
1.9. Ricoeur thus puts on language all the work that might be shared with persons, as our own selectivity comes from others when we come to share their sensibilities There is real tension not only between the terms of a metaphor but also between the perspective of others and the perspective unique to one’s own self. This tension adds anticipation: we wish to share our discoveries, without being certain that they can be shared.
Rhetors make metaphors that reflect the world as it really is, and also as another person sees it.
One crafts metaphor to perceive the world differently, as well as in defiance of a literal definition. The tension between tenor and vehicle is thus compounded by a frisson of surprise, and potentially delight. Metaphors are, for all their other characteristics, also basic fun, much
49 more so than if we were merely passive perceivers of their descriptive force. Making metaphor, we deliberately surprise ourselves. There is reception, to be sure, but the crafting of metaphor cannot be purely dutiful taxonomy.
It is lamentable that Ricoeur does not further explore the “genius” at the origin of metaphor. He has provided himself ample ground to do so. After all, as Ricoeur finds in his extensive dealing with Freud in Freud and Philosophy, psychoanalysis takes the genesis of metaphor as one of its major themes. Indeed, the Freudian Julia Kristeva has gone on from her origins to use Freud as the very basis of an entirely expressive theory of language.97 In her understanding, all language would “live” because it carries the charge of repressed Freudian drives.98 Whether such a theory is correct or not, it clearly provides a “thicker,” more robust understanding of the speaking, acting, or attesting side of truth, a robust understanding that
Ricouer finds lacking in, for example, Searle’s speech act theory.99 It may have benefitted
Ricoeur’s work, then, to have provided a more detailed understanding of attestation, and seeking further after the genesis of metaphor could have helped him in that regard.
Ricoeur had at least one other opportunity to find, or at least more rigorously look for, the genesis of metaphor – and that lay in the work of his near-contemporary Henri Bergson, whose work Ricoeur cites in The Rule of Metaphor, but who is best summarized in the work of Jerrold
Seigel. In Seigel’s understanding, it is in seeking to conceptualize an inner self not described by science that Bergson comes to focus on the concept of duration, on stretches of time which
97 Julia Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva: Updated Edition, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002). 98 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984). 99 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 298.
50 cannot be divided and measured without losing qualitative definition.100 For Seigel, this flowing concept of time as duration, during which one moment leads to another, forms the core of
Bergson’s conception of consciousness.101 What most interests us, however, is the sort of self that Bergon’s proposed self could become. As Seigel understands it, though initially described as an outer self, a moi superficiel, and an interior self, a moi plus profond, which are distinct but not separable, the realization of true selfhood becomes possible for Bergson when the inner self erupts in authentic actions that express the whole self.102 In these cases, the self actually adds something new to itself. This is interesting enough to readers of Ricoeur in its own right, but what is more fascinating still is that, for Bergson, these free and freeing acts are, in Seigel’s words:
“like works of artistic genius in Kant’s account”.... (They) change the rules of the game, and for this no prediction can adequately prepare us for them.... Indeed, it is the acts themselves that allow us to recognize the range of elements and circumstance that contributed to them, by drawing them all together in a new outcome. That most people never experience such moments is just what one would expect.... But the discovery of such freedom in the depths of the person alters our whole view of the world and the self.103
In other words, it sounds like, for Bergson, other people can redescribe the world through their activity. Those who act authentically broaden the potential acts we ourselves consider possible, and the ones we consider human. In Seigel’s understanding, Bergson goes on to claim that these authentic others become the very sources of our morality; saints, sages, and prophets gain their power and significance by re-presenting emotions such as joy, sorrow, pity, and love in novel compositions.104 Thus, one of these exemplars can create a new and original emotion, changing
100 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 518 citing Henry Bergson, Essai Sur Les Données Immédiates de La Conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1909), 67. 101 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 518, citing Bergson, 67. 102 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 520, citing Bergson, 95-100. 103 Seigel, 521, citing Bergson, 156-59. 104 Seigel, 527–28, citing Bergson, 32.
51 how we feel about the world and opening a way to a different relationship with it.105 This new emotion, in turn, “begets thought,” “is pregnant with representations,” and is “productive of ideas.”106 So for Bergson the power of novel re-description belongs to the person, while Ricoeur assigns this power to the metaphor as such. When we consider the quote above, the parallels are clear: in Ricoeur’s own estimation metaphors are works of genius that allow us new recognition as they draw together the terms of their comparison in unpredictable and novel ways.
Yet Ricoeur does not pick up this thread in The Rule of Metaphor. Rather, his citations of
Bergson mostly concern finer linguistic points. Writing about the link of a theory of associative fields and meaning, Ricoeur notes that Bergson suggests that the effort of expression links them.107 Later, his scope of reference is potentially much vaster and more direct, noting that
“with Bergson, the unity of vision and life is carried to the pinnacle of philosophy.... It is in a philosophy of life that the pact between image, time, and contemplation is sealed. There is one particular theory of literary criticism, influenced by Schelling, Coleridge, and Bergson that tries to give an account of this ecstatic moment of poetic language.”108
So Ricoeur goes so far as to recognize the fact that Bergson sought to construct a philosophy of life, but only takes away from this encounter the idea that this philosophy of life provides the basic conception of a poetic language joining image, time, and contemplation.
Concerning what sort of person might live that ‘life philosophy’, or how one might do so oneself, or how other people might respond to them, Ricoeur has precious little to say, so totally has he given to language what Bergson expected persons to accomplish. Clearly, this is no simple ignorance on Ricoeur’s part, as he almost certainly knows Bergson well enough to know the
105 Seigel, 528, citing Bergson, 43. 106 Seigel, 528, citing Bergson, 43. 107 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 117–18. 108 Ricoeur, 250.
52 project his work produced. Now, to be sure, within the Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur is in any case more interested in the power of metaphor itself. Still, turning away from Bergson here does represent a choice, and one which takes us away from the genesis of metaphor that we find in others. And that choice will have a consequence of omission when Ricoeur turns to the position of persons in his narrative theory, which we will cover in our third chapter.
1.10. Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor tacitly reframes the purpose of language as that of exploring possibility, and implicitly ties rhetor and audience to one another, and both of them to truth, in discourse
We have made a great deal of hay out of Riceour’s understanding of manifestation, attestation, and truth in a chapter ostensively devoted to Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor and our search for its genesis. There are several reasons for our elaboration, beyond simply revisiting the classic discussion between realists and nominalists (though Ricouer does add an interesting wrinkle to that debate). But first and most obviously, we have simply followed
Ricoeur where he himself goes: the last two chapters of The Rule of Metaphor explore, respectively, how words refer and how poetic language affects philosophy. We would have been remiss had we not followed the arc of that argument, and made some accounting of what that means for metaphor’s origin.
Second, we wish to show the true radicality of Ricoeur’s claims, which might otherwise be obscured in technical discussions with structural linguistics; by highlighting the way poetic language unfolds possibility, Ricoeur helps to move the debate about what language properly
“ought” to do. If the goal of language is not to succeed or fail in assuring our certainty, but to succeed or fail in being reliable and salutary, then the philosophical framework shifts, and language becomes a glad handmaiden to sound scientific and humanitarian understanding, even
53 when no Pythagorean proof is possible. Ricoeur has thus helped us move beyond the old impasse where language can only succeed or fail in corresponding to some state of affairs, and where we are bound to the dichotomies of realism and nominalism and must simply stake our claim, a situation in which language becomes a kind of permanently impaired mathematics, and we can get no further ahead. But the radical implication of Ricoeur’s argument in The Rule of Metaphor is that metaphor shifts our categories of thinking. The sections of the book that speak to how metaphor references, and to how being manifests in the world in ways intelligible through such language, assign to language a new productive capacity that is neither arbitrary, as it would be in the nominalist case, nor denotative, as it would be in the realist case, but productive, as it expands the possibilities of what being can be.
Third, the metaphysical implications of metaphor do affect our search for the genesis of metaphor. Ricoeur’s thorough linking of rhetor and audience in metaphor, in the very structure of its possibility, in the warp and weft of its life-world, implies that we should also expect rhetor and audience to be bound together in metaphor’s earliest inception. In this chapter, we have traced Ricoeur’s argument from the definition of metaphors as living, polysemic redescriptions, to the effect those metaphors have upon our understanding of the world, and the very world accessible to our understanding in manifestation. Metaphors present a scene. And we saw that
Ricoeur, by implicating poetic language in manifestation through accessibility or intelligibility, brings auditor as well as speaker into the generation of language as a whole: where no audience is implied, truth cannot be told. As presentation, metaphor implies an audience. We have learned that the genesis of metaphor will not be solitary.
The immediate implication is, of course, that other people seem required to enrich and extend our understanding, and even to enrich and extend the world itself. As Ricoeur seeks to
54 emphasize in The Rule of Metaphor, metaphor, because of its unique power to describe and re- describe the world, actually has the capacity to enrich and extend the world of our understanding, and something of the world itself. We should also not ignore that fact that he brings other people, and not only the thinking subject, into the very bones of metaphor, into the condition of its possibility. Because Ricoerian understanding is so linguistic, and because Ricoerian language is so metaphoric, taking metaphor as its root, the deeper implication may be that we need to extend beyond even the notions of extension and enrichment, and say that it is other people that make the world of our understanding possible at all. Such a notion, naturally, will extend far beyond this chapter and into subsequent chapters. But we hope we have at least raised it as a question.
We also hope we have made it clear that metaphor ought, by dint of its nature as an imitable sensibility, as techne, be something that can be taught. The origin of metaphor lies in imitative play: we learn by mimicking skillful users. This has become the conclusion of our argument in this chapter. Since contemporary science has taught us that it is indeed impossible to be essentially passive before a situation, we must have recourse to some way of knowing that is not arbitrary. Relying first on the skill of successful others, as we do with language, is a natural route to such a sensibility. As Stanley Cavell writes of learning language:
And we can also say: When you say “I love my love,” the child learns the meaning of the word “love” and what love is. That what you do will be love in the child’s world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought. When you say “I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise,” the child begins to learn what temporal durations are, and what trust is, and what you do will show what trust is worth.... In learning language you do not merely learn what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish, but what a wish is; not merely what the word for father is, but what a father is.... We initiate them, into the relevant forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of our world. For that to be
55 possible, we must make ourselves exemplary and take responsibility for that assumption of authority.109
Metaphor is a prime example and product of this kind of imitative knowing; we cannot arrive at it by simply naming things. Its charging energy may well come from its nature as an element of discourse which means from its very origin to teach or persuade, and from its composition as a sentence which always and already addresses others. Metaphor is both taught by and addressed to others. It is accomplished through innovation as well as imitation. It is, among other things, a question dared to the world, a private discovery brought to the public square: can you see this way too? Thus, the tension of metaphor lies not only, or perhaps not chiefly, in the fraught relationship between its terms. If that is so, we might make an expansion similar to one Ricoeur himself made, and say that in this energy, metaphor is similar to another, longer form of discourse: the testimony, to which we now turn.
109 Stanley Cavell, Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 177–78.
56 CHAPTER TWO:
KINDS OF TESTIMONY
2.1. Ricoeur’s preference for confessional, historically-grounded testimony commits him to omitting several possibilities that his own understanding of metaphor has introduced
We shall begin our chapter on testimony in the same way we did our chapter on metaphor: with Ricoeur, who writes extensively on the very sort of personal and historical narrative that we call testimony. Narrative, for Ricoeur, allows us to structure our experience as we order the relentless flow of events we encounter in time. Emplotment begins this process, interpretation further structures our experience, and between the two the Ricoeurian subject comes to understand itself in the telling. Thus Ricoeur develops a rigorous understanding of the self throughout the three volumes of Time and Narrative and into Oneself as Another.
We are given some reason for pause when we consider that, given Ricoeur’s preference in his understanding of metaphor for poetic creativity in language, Ricoeur seems to lean toward the dictionary – the factual, the less polysemic – when it comes to articulated experience, as opposed to the more expansive possibilities suggested by metaphor. We might wonder why there is no “did and did not” of narrative to accompany the “is and is not” of metaphor, and it is this question that prompts this second chapter.
Like any approach, Ricoeur’s heavy emphasis on the power of narrative to structure experience has both advantages and limitations. Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative boasts strong and coherent ties to time and to causation, among the very structures of experience that
Kant names transcendental. As Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative: “by means of the plot, goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and
57 complete action…. [The plot] of a narrative…grasps together and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events.”110 This understanding is a great boon to those whose experience has been silenced or become incoherent, as in the cases of oppression and trauma. Such people can gain considerable relief, freedom, and empowerment by articulating their stories as if for the first time.
Yet we suspect that a Ricoerian narrative alone will not account for all that experience has to offer, and may in fact distort that experience in the telling. As we hope to show, Ricoeur’s emphasis on the historicality of confessional narrative closes down possibilities that the is/not copula of metaphor opens up. Second, Ricoeur’s framing the self as both the beginning and end of the narrative task risks eliding the very real import that others have, not just on our narratives, but also on our experience itself – and not just at the level of influence and inflection, but also as a condition of possibility for experience.
By way of helpful contrast, we therefore introduce the work of another French thinker,
Emmanuel Levinas, who writes that we bear an obligation to others at a level more primordial than that of both language and the epistemic. Accordingly, Levinas offers a contrasting form of narrative: the testimony. If Ricoeurian narrative can be likened to confession, which can only be on behalf of the self, Levinasian testimony can be likened to witness, which tends to be either made on behalf of others or as an apology for the self in the face of others.111 This becomes key to identifying the very structure of the Levinasian self: I am most myself when I am oriented away from myself, interrupted by and responding to the call of others. Though Levinas does not
110 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), ix. 111 “Apology, in which the I at the same time asserts itself and inclines before the transcendent, belongs to the essence of conversation.” (emphases mine). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, trans. Alphonso LIngis (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 40.
58 seem to name it, in accordance with the self’s essentially dependent passivity, we will call this property of the self natality, and seek to use it in our reconciliation of a modified Levinasian testimony with Ricoeurian narrative. In developing our notion of natality as the human condition of having been born and developed for several years without our conscious understanding, we will seek to differentiate it from other uses of the term, including Hannah Arendt’s notable adaptation, and develop a fuller account of the generation of persons by focusing, if only for a philosophical moment, on this inescapable period of every human life.112
In trying to reconcile Ricoeur and Levinas, we will find that, since they pursue such different projects, we might gain some ground if we consider the order in which their theoretical structures occur, rather than the arguments between them. There is nothing in Ricoeur which says that a narrating self cannot form as inchoate response to another, and there is nothing in
Levinas which says that subjectivity stops when narrative begins. As suggested by their divergent approaches, we might find something of a reconciliation if we simply consider a separate, third kind of testimony with which both thinkers could agree.
We will then present several forms of testimony which we believe fill our criteria. The first type, which we call allusive attestation, refers to our resounding with the influence of others, even at a level where we cannot speak, in ways we cannot necessarily name. The cases of artistic and parental influence, examples of this phenomenon, register a Levinasian priority of the other which later allows for the Ricoeurian speaking, narrating, self-distinguishing self. The
112 As Arendt so powerfully writes: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.” Where Arendt would emphasize the novelty of this, we would emphasize the ontological passivity of natality that makes all novelty and activity possible. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.
59 second type, which we call imaginative testimony, encompasses all manner of narrative forms that are more imaginative than historical: for example, magical realism, comedy, and caricature all use elements of narrative that Ricoeur neglects – imagery, mood, and tone – in order to present an experience that is “thicker” than Ricoeurian history allows. The richness of imaginary testimony allows us to see a self that is not only put “off-center,” but is also formed and re- formed by the stories it tells about all manner of things, particularly in the telling. Here, too, through the refusal of experience to be entirely absorbed into the linguistic realm, we see a self that is continually formed as it focuses on elements of experience which it cannot readily grasp.
Ironically, by being more imaginative, imaginary testimony can make a better accounting of experience than confessional history does, so long as our capacity to imagine rises to meet that experience.
2.2. Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative begins and ends with a historical self, while Levinasian subjectivity is oriented toward, and summoned by, others
Ricoeur begins his exploration of narrative with the Aristotelian concept of mimesis: art imitates life, just as in the popular understanding. Ricoeur elaborates on this, adding that narrative, having begun with the raw “stuff” of one’s own experience, requires a conceptual bridge to link this to the “stuff” of narrative: plot, causality, and time. Thus, imitation for Ricoeur ends up being threefold. Mimesis1, the first of three kinds of mimesis that Ricoeur observes, is that the events of life are, like the events of a story, selectable. They are “pre-understood.”
Neither the raw elements of experience nor the base elements of a story come to us as chaos.
They both come to us, one imitating the other, as understandable and possessing a certain coherence, particularly through their enmeshment in causality and time. Thus Ricoeur says that
60 in mimesis1, stories are prefigured.113 One can find coherent patterns in life, and go on to make of them the form and substance of a story, complete with plot, character, and temporal structure.
Because of the very nature of our lives, we can say that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end – with of course many beginnings, middles, and endings in between. But the mere fact of our determining that experiences or stories have these points is itself another kind of mimesis, because we perform the same selection for both narrative and life: by choosing or even thinking of these events in a coherent order, we begin to understand them. Mimesis2 is the process of selecting these events and characteristics. Marked by emplotment, this second kind of mimesis connects individual events to a greater and emerging whole, a plot structured by causality and time.
But emplotment is the poet’s task, and it is only in the hands of the reader or audience that the third kind of mimesis will be employed. Mimesis3 describes the act of interpretation and application, where our understanding of a work in turn structures our expectations for our lives.
1 2 3 If mimesis is prefiguration, and mimesis configuration, we may understand mimesis as refiguration. The stories that we share shape and structure the very “stuff” of our experience.
Mimesis in the totality of its variations, then, seems to describe a circular or spiral understanding of narrative and life alike. This quality should not surprise us, if we consider the pattern of truth described by manifestation and attestation.
Demonstrably, Ricoeur’s point of entry into the circle of interpretation is the subject, and the self certainly seems to be the place to which Ricoeur’s thinking about narrative continually returns. Thus, Ricoeur’s threefold understanding of narrative can become a source of strength
113 Graham Livesy, “The Role of Figure in Metaphor, Narrative and Architecture,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997), 25–29. Livesy and others draw on Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 1, 74–75.
61 and self-determination for those who have had their narratives disrupted. It can even restore the integrity of a postmodern self whose agency has been eroded by displacing forces.114 As Morny
Joy writes, the emplotment Ricoeur proposes can “help a person establish a bridgehead from which he/she can thematize a set of events that may otherwise be too chaotic or too distressing.”115 It would certainly be reckless to construct a version of the self entirely without such empowering structures.
But, as with any intellectual position, Ricoeur’s thinking on narrative has strictures and limitations. One such limitation may be its self-focus. It is not necessarily the case that narrative and experience must be about the self in the way that Ricouer seems to imagine. We do not spend most of our time thinking about ourselves, after all; we spend most of it thinking about things, people, and events other than ourselves, even if we do so as we weigh their importance to us. If we are by any measure what we do, it should matter that we devote so much of our energies to others of various kinds. And, while we allow that the time we spend reflecting upon our experiences – and ourselves – may be crucial, we may not need to draw the boundary between self and experience as firmly as Ricoeur, and much philosophy, seems to have done.
A second, and more technical limitation may be Ricoeur’s consideration of history proper as narrative in the hands of “the great historian,” who structures events via emplotment into
“natural” rather than fictive history.116 This seems to close down the rather more open possibilities advanced by metaphor, where rhetor and audience alike contribute to a poem’s real
3 significance. While there is audience selectivity in mimesis , by confining that selectivity to only
114 Morny Joy, “Writing as Repossession: The Narratives of Incest Victims,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997), 36. 115 Joy, 38. 116 C. Bryn Pinchin, “Essaying Ricoeur,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997), 142.
62 2 the events presented in mimesis , Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative leaves the audience very much playing a structural second fiddle, and the poet or historian very much in the demonstrable lead. As he writes, “my thesis rests on the assertion of an indirect connection by derivation, by which historical knowledge proceeds from our narrative understanding without losing anything of its scientific ambition…. To reconstruct the indirect connections of history to narrative is finally to bring to light the intentionality of the historian’s thought by which history continues obliquely to intend the field of human action and its basic temporality.”117 Such a thesis may laudably ground the intent of the historian to speak to the real, and intriguingly grants history itself a sort of agency, but frames the discussion of history as a discourse which, notably, requires no contribution from, or any orientation toward, an audience.
By beginning and ending with the self or historian, by leaving historical narrative in the terms of non-fictive events, and by relying on the authority of one and only one person, Ricoeur diminishes the role of the audience and limits narrative’s potential power to mime the experience that forms the self. Morever, Ricoeur considers the historical confessions of events which did occur, while he neglects poetic narratives that have the potential to evoke the full implications of our understanding, thus tilting narrative toward the empirical cause rather than the human effect.
To put it plainly, where Ricoeurian narrative toes the historical line in reporting things as they have been and eschewing the poetry of things as they might be, Ricoerian narrative does not
117 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 1, 92. Indeed, a word-search of all three volumes of the document indicates that Ricoeur refers to “historian” 426 times and “audience” a total of 10. In the first of these, Ricoeur explains that he is here following Aristotle’s transition from the Rhetoric, where audience is a fundamental concern, to Poetics, where composition – or, more precisely, structuration – supplants it. Since history is contrasted against poetry (that is, fiction) throughout Time and Narrative, the work ends up not considering the ways in which history may or may not be rhetoric. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), http://www.al-edu.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Paul-Ricoeur-Time-and- Narrative-vol1.pdf. (That so many of Ricoeur’s works are now available online is a welcome boon to word-usage research, particularly for terms not typically included in indexes.)
63 encompass things as they might have been, or things as they have seemed – all of which may be important to the stories we tell about ourselves, especially the ones we might tell together.
When it comes to emplotment, strictly speaking, I do not include how things might or could have been. Yet if we were to follow the ways of metaphor we would do precisely this, because considering reality “as if” is very much metaphor’s aim and goal. The limitations of history apply, cross-genre, to personal narrative. In the Ricoeurian understanding, when I select the plot points of my life, I choose from the stuff of my personal history, from my past, from my already extant experience.
Thus Ricoeurian narrative, we might say, does not allow for magical realism – an ahistorical technique adopted by many post-colonial writers specifically to counteract the stifling, scientistic premises of official imperial histories.118 It does not allow us to augment actual events with plausible or signifying ones. This seems an odd commitment here, as Ricoeur insists that metaphor, at least, manifests new being. Why should narrative not have the same potential efficacy? Narrative might be freed to go beyond the actual, just as metaphor launches us beyond considerations of true or false and into weighing liveliness or death. Why should narrative not include the copula of the is/not? After all, it is metaphor that leads Ricoeur to begin analyzing narrative in the first place. By running with the historical as the model narrative for the formation of the self, Ricoeur shunts aside several other possible types of narrative, and it is to these kinds that we will eventually turn.
Narrative may depart from the historical in another way: in life we do not get to select all of the stories that constitute our identity. The first stories many of us hear about our own
118 Lindsay Moore, “Magical Realism,” Academic Blog, Postcolonial Studies (blog), Fall 1998, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/magical-realism/.
64 experience come not from ourselves, but from our parents. In this way, we do not seem entirely to plot our own history – even while allowing the ostensible help of others. For we may be the subjects of stories that are not our own. Though Ricoeur correctly writes that we do not remember our births,119 we do know about them. We are told when and how we were born, and what unpredicted events ensued. For better or worse, we are first told about ourselves – whether we were (are) bright or willful, adventurous or shy, independent or affectionate, before we can even remember our own experience.
After all, if so much of our identity is formed in the first two years, as contemporary research attests,120 then it seems odd that our entire understanding of our own identity would hinge on the process of selecting events that occur precisely after that period. Identity formation occurs even before we begin to tell ourselves who we are. That we might eventually differentiate ourselves from these tales only underscores their orienting force. Narratives might matter most for us, ironically, when they are not our own. Our own stories must be, at least originally, embedded in these familial tales.
A third limitation of Ricoeurian narrative may be demonstrated in the kind of narrative
Ricoeur chooses to adopt: the confessional. For Ricoeur, as we have said, the self attests or witnesses to what the self has suffered. I testify to what happened to me. The endurance of the self through this suffering constitutes the difference between Ricoeur’s idem and ipse identities, between the self who is similar only to itself and the self who endures change through time.
119 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 160. 120 Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape How We Are, Second (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2015).
65 Now, as I have noted, Ricoeur does provide for a genuinely convivial relationship between self and other. In Ricoeur’s thinking, the other is constitutive of the self and the reason for the self’s development. Because I cannot clearly perceive myself, I am other to myself, and depend on the perspective of others for my own self-understanding. This is Ricoeur’s famous departure from Husserl, who is, in turn, trying to break away from Descartes’ cogito. Combined with and flowing from his understanding of narrative in mimesis, Ricoeur’s notion of porous subjectivity is a significant achievement, one that has found successful adaptation in narrative and other therapies,121 as well as feminist theory.122
But Ricoeur’s conception of porous subjectivity also marks his departure from Levinas, and perhaps therefore it misses something that Levinas’s conception of subjectivity possesses.
For Levinas, not only is the self not transparent to itself, the self is not fundamentally or finally oriented toward itself at all. Rather, the self is called or summoned to action by the face of the other, by the presence of the other, and by the other’s uniqueness and difference, which we shall, along with Levinas and for our purposes, call alterity. According to Patrick L. Bourgeois,
Levinas calls upon ancient Jewish sacred narrative to provide the foundations for a theory that seeks to describe the moral nature of existence and the nature of its claims.123 And those claims are absolute. Indeed, if there is one common critique of Levinas, it is that the call of the other seems too relentless, too harsh to allow for a livable ethical situation.124 As Richard A. Cohen
121 Joy, “Writing as Repossession,” 35–36. 122 Helen M. Buss, “Women’s Memoirs and the Embodied Imagination: The Gendering of Genre That Makes History and Literature Nervous,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997), 87–96. 123 Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Ricoeur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 112. 124 Bourgeois, 110.
66 observes, Levinas’ understanding can seem to be, and indeed does seem to Ricoeur to be, not a maximal relationship, but rather an untenable alienation of the self from the other.125
So, if we are going to arrive at some viable contemporary understanding of human subjectivity, it would seem we must come to some rapprochement between these two perspectives. Though the reconciliation will not be easy, we cannot ignore the motivations that lead to their differences. Ricoeur’s aim from Time and Narrative on is to account for the formation of the capable self. Levinas’ aim in Totality and Infinity seems to be the disruption of the self for the sake of the other.126 This alone may account for many of their differences. But is it wrong to think, in good Ricoeurian fashion, that each position sees something of the truth?
Postmodernity, after all, understands the self as nothing if not interrupted, a thought seemingly congenial to Levinas. But any understanding of personal agency almost certainly must see the self as at least somewhat contiguous, a thought seemingly congenial to Ricoeur. There ought to be a path forward that includes both of these truths.
2.3. Levinasian testimony differs from most Western philosophy in that it begins where language ends, “before” being even appears to us
A closer examination of Levinas seems in order. We have explored some of the contrasts between Ricoeur and Levinas, but we have not yet explained Levinasian testimony itself in any detail. And to do that, we must begin with Levinasian subjectivity, the heart of his philosophy.
This is because for Levinas being is not first on the world stage. Being is preceded by ethics, by a moral call. This changes every other element of his philosophy. It certainly affects his
125 Richard A. Cohen, “Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian Response to Ricoeur on Levinas,” ed. Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 127–29. 126 Cohen, 138.
67 understanding of language, as he ends up describing quite a different side of it than Ricoeur does, and emphasizing something quite different about it.
Levinas is interested in an inarticulable relation, a primordial obligation, that language cannot represent. Thus, Levinasian testimony is not speech as we understand it. It is, rather, what gives speech meaning.127 We may be said to give Levinasian testimony not when we open our mouths, but when we present ourselves before others. Indeed, for Levinas, that is when we become ourselves. We may be said to testify when we resound with the call that others have made upon us. For Levinas, this happens when we speak “Here I am” in responding to the call of the face of the other. Yet for our purposes, and considering what we have learned from the genesis of metaphor, we do not suppose that we need to wait for our own volition, or any one particular moment, to respond to the presence of another who is always and already with us by way of influence. Indeed, as we take up the sensibilities of others, we might be said, in part, to become our response to them. If so, we might call our testimony allusive, rather than confessional or even ethical in the way that Levinas proposes, more akin to one artist following in the way of past masters than it is like testifying on one’s own behalf, answering an irresistible moral call, or responding to an inescapable accusation. Yet as inter-personal influence, this testimony, too, is not ordinary knowledge, and is free of knowledge’s reductive perils.
An understanding of Levinas, then, with some modifications, can correct a Ricoeurian order of operations when we consider the self. Levinasian subjectivity follows the empirical order of natality, which begins in utero. Others precede us and introduce us to the world. The idea is not, as Ricoeur thinks, to place a breach between the self and other but to show how
127 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), 61.
68 deeply the self requires the other, not only for its development, but for its very being. The other is more fundamental than the self not from some objective vantage point, but because it is more fundamental than the self from the self’s own perspective. For Levinas, the self begins in responsibility for the other. We will soon see that our ability to respond to others is a power we must, by definition, receive from them, which seems to us a natural extension of Levinasian thought. But for Levinas himself, simply beginning with ethics rather than epistemology unlocks facets of subjectivity that remain obscure to Ricoeur.
Levinasian subjectivity is a relationship to an unrepresentable conscience: a responsibility for the other.128 Subjectivity is not consciousness itself, as it has been for much of
Western thought, including Ricoeur, Heidegger, and Kant. Levinasian subjectivity may entail consciousness and actually produces what Levinas calls the psychism,129 but his concern is first with the anarchic responsibility for the other.130 As one reader notes, in Levinas “the occurrence and the comprehension of being are founded upon another, deeper dimension, the imputation of responsibility, which precedes every initiative of ours and which Levinas calls substitution.”131
So not only does Levinasian subjectivity – that is, ethical responsibility for the Other – precede consciousness, it also precedes being.132 This directly opposes the Aristotelian mainstream, which posits that the order of being’s presentation, the organization of the cosmos, does not depend on the perception of the senses.133 Being presents itself as order to our senses.
128 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriann Theodoor Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 97. 129 Levinas, 97. 130 Levinas, 103. 131 Luk Bouckaert, “Ontology and Ethics: Reflections on Levinas’ Critique of Heidegger,” International Philosophical Quarterly 10, no. 3 (n.d.): 413. 132 Bouckaert, 397. 133 “If it is true that the movement, both the acting and the being acted upon, is to be found in that which is acted upon, both the sound and the hearing so far as it is actual must be found in that which has the faculty of hearing; for
69 Levinas, however, asserts instead that this “indifference” of the disclosed with respect to our consciousness itself depends on intelligibility.134 The two come hand in hand. For Levinas, signifying goes with the brilliance of appearing.135 Mind and manifestation seem simultaneous, with both preceded by my obligation to an Infinite.
As so much of what Ricoeur says depends on manifestation, this area may be where he and Levinas find themselves most deeply at odds. For Ricoeur says very little about what might precede the manifestation of being in the world. All his attesting comes after this, in the field of finitude’s witnessing agents and causal, temporal events. Indeed, one might imagine him being puzzled by Levinas’ assertion entirely: what could there possibly be to say about that which comes before being unfurls in the world? Language stops where being in the world ends, and so does Ricoeurian testimony, particularly discourse. His theory of metaphor, we recall, comes from
Aristotelian rhetoric, and he develops that understanding through the speech-act theory of John
Searle. There could hardly be an understanding of language more focused on the spoken. But for
Levinas, what language does not and cannot say is precisely the most interesting thing about it.
Levinas is concerned with the difference between the meaning of words and what words themselves can actually say. There is in every case a deficit, which he dubs the gap between the
Saying and the Said. For Levinas, language either refers to the discovery of being or contributes to it, but cannot signify beyond it.136 Yet language nonetheless speaks to what it cannot
it is in the passive factor that the actuality of the active or motive factor is realized; that is why that which causes movement may be at rest.” The position is formalized in both Aristotle’s doctrine of reception and his understanding that sense organs only perceive as they take on the nature of the perceived. Aristotle, “On the Soul,” trans. J.A. Smith. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, (New York: Random House, 2001.) 426a-a5. 134 Emmanuel Levinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony,” in Truth: Engagements Across Philosphical Traditions, ed. Jose Medina and David Wood, Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 261. 135 Levinas, “The Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony,” 100. 136 Levinas, 100.
70 articulate: our inescapable responsibility for the other. Yet the status of language in both thinkers may be our first opportunity for reconciliation. Though Ricoeur and Levinas are at odds on language, they do not disagree on its definition, its powers, or its limits. Rather, they disagree on what the role of language is, and what is most important about it. The testimony that is confessional can only ever be conceived in relation to being.137 And the story of subjective testimony opens personal experience to universality and investigation138 – all of this should sound familiar and agreeable to readers of Ricoeur. His theory of metaphor is precisely that it does contribute to being.
But readers of Levinas might be able to say that Levinas is simply not interested in the ways that language, for example, might affect the intelligible manifestation of being. For if the subject is – instead of some form of self-understanding – primarily and primordially a relation with the non-representable, then all of a sudden we find ourselves in a quandary: I cannot confess anything of another, because by virtue of their being other, they remain beyond any experience that I can unfold through narration. They are non- thematizable.139 If Levinasian subjectivity is at all true, then, confessional testimony will not suffice to describe its experience of encountering others in the world. This is not a question of finding fault with confessional testimony, but simply of noting what it is not, and what it cannot do.
2.4. Our appearance before others re-orients the self as an appearing in the world that may be akin to the immemorial natality we each experience
137 Levinas, 100. 138 Levinas, 100. 139 Which does not mean that I have nothing whatsoever to say on another’s behalf, in Levinas’s understanding. What it does mean is that what I have to say will not be confession per se.
71 Yet we must say something as we approach the inarticulable. There must be another kind of testimony, which performs a different function than confession does. We might search for it in
Levinas in the Infinite, to which, in his understanding, testimony properly belongs.140 When I testify, my testimony exhibits me as what I am: being for the other.141 If being is indifferent to consciousness in the Aristotelian tradition, if our perception and articulation of the universe does not affect it, then, in a similar way we may say that testimony is unaffected by the self in the
Levinasian tradition: the nature of the particular self does not seem to affect the testimony given, though it may come to each of us specifically. We do not specifically qualify testimony, beyond locating it in the finite. Testimony, writes Levinas, is the revelation that gives us nothing, yet uses us because the Infinite does not know how to appear in the world without accepting limits.142 We neither affect nor are affected by testimony in terms of knowledge. This is the very nature of our responsibility to the Infinite and for the Infinite: we are summoned by what we cannot circumscribe.143
For Levinas, the soul itself is the Other within me. The eruption of the Infinite occurs as trauma.144 It leaves us no respite, no safe haven. For Levinas, the psychism is alienated in its depths.145 It is being “out of phase” with itself.146 And to this profound rupture, testimony is our response without evasion, without experience, and without proof.147 Testimony is Saying without
140 Levinas, “The Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony,” 103. 141 Levinas, 97. 142 Levinas, 103. 143 Levinas, 103. 144 Levinas, 103. 145 Levinas, 101. 146 Levinas, 101. 147 Levinas, 103.
72 a Said.148 When we respond, “Here I am,” as in response to a summons, this is the modality by which the Infinite comes to pass.
If Levinasian subjectivity seems to begin in alienation, it also seems to have a possibility of coming home, not to its own self-reflection, but as a self responding to others. Our response is, paradoxically, the moment in which the self appears. Being for the other, the self can only identify itself in this way, as a voice responding to others, without reference to itself.149 The self affirms its existence not by representing itself, but by presenting itself before others. Look at what occurs: the one for the other, writes Levinas, has all the gravity of the body. It has all the capability of giving – indeed it is the capability of giving! When we respond to others as others, we restore ourselves as ourselves. The union of the soul and the body, concludes Levinas, is the animation of the self by the other.
Being toward others grants our being flesh – flesh manifests our exposure to the other in the world. What do we name by this phenomenon? How do we understand clearly this subordination of oneself to others in the very possibility of becoming a self? Levinas presents one tantalizing possibility, when he claims that, facing others, we see their maternity.150 Yet
Levinas tends to depict the burden of responsibility for others such that maternity remains primarily gestated within us, and tends not to use maternity to refer to any property of the other or to any encounter with alterity that conditions or structures the possibility of our becoming. Yet
148 Levinas, 103. 149 Levinas, 105. 150 As Shankman, in a lovely article, quotes Levinas in Otherwise than Being: “Sensibility is exposedness to the other…. [I]t is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of offering itself, which would be an act…. It is maternity, gestation of the other in the same. Is not the worry over someone who is being persecuted but a modification of maternity, ‘the groaning of the entrails wound in those who shall give birth and who had been giving birth? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substituting for others” Steven Shankman, “From Solitude to Maternity: Levinas and Shakespeare,” Levinas Studies: An Annual Review 8 (2013): 75. Citing Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh. PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 75.
73 we would note that his position does not rule out understanding maternity in this way. Instead,
Levinasian maternity is the gestation of the Other in the same, not gestation of the self by the
Other. More, Levinas intends his animation of the self by the other in an ethical sense that we ourselves do not – at least not initially.
For we are not certain that we refer to the same others that Levinas does. We are uncertain, first, because the Other whom Levinas so emphasizes – the Other who makes the clearest moral call, namely, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger – seems so different from the nourishing Other of the family that we emphasize. We may well grow from the challenge that such Levinasian others make upon us, but that is hardly the point of their interruption for
Levinas, though it is often the purpose of the ‘nurturing’ Other’s interruption for us. We should, after all, hope that our caregivers intend our growth, for that intent is part and parcel of any nurture that we would receive in the home. Such familiarity must necessarily be very different from the occasions of alterity experienced in the public square, where motives may differ wildly, the cessation of violence is by no means assumed, and safety seems rather more urgent than development.
Yet we are also uncertain that we refer to the same Others as Levinas does even when he seems to include the feminine as a nurturing influence within the dwelling:
The familiarity of the world does not only result from habits acquired in this world, which take from it its roughness and measure the adaptation of the living being to a world it enjoys and from which it nourishes itself; familiarity and gentleness are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things…. The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human…. And the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman.151
151 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 155.
74 While this description of familiarity and intimacy in the home would at first seem very congenial to our own understanding of alterity, we have a few reservations about agreeing with Levinas’s understanding entirely. First, we do not suppose that intimacy precludes exactly the kind of challenge that Levinas supposes in the more public encounter with the Other; it surely cannot be as though the face of the Woman (or whatever figure one uses to signify nurture) does not also command us not to kill, and does not also elide our understanding in much the same way as the stranger does, as Levinas himself establishes when he writes that “the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence.”152 We would certainly agree that there may be, in this way, quite a bit of strangeness within familiarity; we certainly do not intend our mothers or other caregivers to be only nurturing to us, but to have the robust, multi-faceted and irreducible identities that would sustain and enrich the nurturing they do accomplish. But if there is as much cross-cutting between familiarity and withdrawal in the dwelling as Levinas supposes, we would wonder why there might not be an equal amount of exchange between alterity and intimacy in the public market, why the encounter with the stranger could not also nurture, whatever its other purposes, and why the other of the dwelling and the other of the public would be necessary to begin with. What we seek in understanding alterity as we have is to begin to imagine not only an alterity that nourishes, and not only an alterity that challenges or interrupts, and certainly not an alterity that seems split between these roles, but rather an alterity robust enough to imagine both familiarity and intimacy as forces working between all persons who relate to one another, to varying degrees and at various times.
152 Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, 155.
75 For it is not clear to us that only absolute strangers would have the claims of alterity upon us, nor at what point, and under what conditions, our parents or other family would become
“the same” or “extensions of the same,” since our very first experiences of absence – of remove, distance, and loss – occur when our parents or other caregivers leave the room. They are almost certainly among the first and most significant other faces we will ever see! In psychological terms, both Freud and Lacan, as well as contemporary neuroscience, say that identification with another precedes the individuation of oneself.153 One relates to mother long before one relates to self. This would make little sense if mothers were understood as similarity only. So it seems to us that any comprehensive understanding of alterity must include the very first and very material examples of other persons that we encounter, even if we do appear among them before we are aware of any obligation to them that we might hold.
In a similar vein, we emphasize also a more literal – and, if we may borrow from Ricoeur
– a more biographical sense of maternity, in that we literally do gestate in others and are cared for by them before we even have memories of that care available to us. To be sure, we believe this meaning of maternity is certainly made possible by Levinas when he establishes that others – or the call of responsibility from others – condition the possibility of the emergence of our (true) consciousness. After all, we are the response that emerges from this calling. Yet, given our departure from Levinas here, as well as our emphasis on our own dependence and reliance rather
153 Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape How We Are, (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2015). More specifically, see Alan Fogel, “Origins of the Self in Early Infancy: Is Perception Sufficient,” in Psycholgical Inquiry 3, no. 2 (1992): 117: “The infant’s self-perception of control over actions occurs precisely at the point where there is control and the adult takes over the process…. Development of self, a sense of self-history and identity, as well as a conceptual understanding of the self, can only arise when the perceptual apparatus lives in a human social context.”
76 than the other’s call to responsibility, it is best that we not confuse his term by extending or twisting it in a different direction than he intends.
There is, however, a word from philosophy which does reflect our own dependence and reliance, and that is the term natality. However, we should be careful, here, too, as there have been two different senses of the word. The first and most famous appears in the work of Hannah
Arendt, in her discussion of the actuality of novelty and plurality in the moral and political world.154 For her, natality characterizes our emergence in the political, public world of action.155
Thus, her notion of natality seems to emphasize the initiative, invention, activity and creativity of the adult that our natality makes possible. We embrace this emphasis, but note that it is also possible to emphasize the passivity of our natality, from our own gestation and conception, through our earliest and most formative years. Natality in this latter, passive sense is something quickly forgotten, if we are ever conscious of it at all.
Yet it is precisely the oblivion of natality that reveals something about us. As Anne
O’Byrne writes, providing another understanding of natality:
We stumble into the world on the offbeat. Natality has its own syncopated temporality to which birth happens without our knowing and every one of us is here for years before we come to find ourselves in the midst of things. Since we are before we know and are known before we know, the gap between coming to be and coming to know is crammed with experience which is not quite mine and not even experience at all, falling as it does beyond the reach of memory.”156
Surely it matters that we are known before we know and that we are here for so long “before we find ourselves in the midst of things.” Surely it must matter, too, that we are not capable of
154 We should note that she is not alone in this; Heidegger, Derrida, Hegel and Nancy all have notions strongly connected to natality, even if they do not happen to use the term. We use Arendt here simply because her use of natality is so prominent, and so clear. 155 Maurizio Passerin D’ Entreves, “Hannah Arendt,” in Stanford Encycolopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed November 5, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/. 156 Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 122.
77 providing for our own food, shelter, or clothing during this period – we are the very definition of dependent on others for our very survival, the actuality of our existence. This is true no less outside the womb than inside it. Perhaps this is why O’Byrne includes the notion of syncopation, which finds meaning in not only the off-beat nature of natality and our lack of consciousness within its duration, but also “as the Greek root of the word says, in the sense of syn-cope or cutting together.”157
The gap in our memory that natality provides opens the way for the self to form. As Anne
O’Byrne, the author of Natality and Finitude, quotes the work of Jean-Luc Nancy:
The syncope (in Greek, for example, the act of leaving a letter out of a word; in music a strong beat coming after a silence) joins and separates at the same time. To be sure, the two operations do not add up, but they also do not cancel one another out. What is left is the syncope itself, the same, syncopated, that is, divided up in pieces and in a certain way reunited, gathered in by amputation.158
We come to receive meaning; we eventually come to be meaning. That is what is at stake in the
Greek root of syncope and cutting-with. As O’Byrne goes on to note: “the same comes to be by being removed or removing itself from the (m)other.... [W]e are born the same, syncopated, in the sense that we are neither part nor whole, neither imbued with meaning granted by that of which we are part nor already meaning ourselves.”159
Readers of Levinas will note, not only our dependence on, but also our inescapable orientation toward, our most primordial origins, and that those beginnings are in, around, and through other people. It is certainly paradoxical that such a formative period as natality should be obscure to us as we experience it. Natality, with its immemorial quality, elides our awareness,
157 O’ Byrne, 22. 158 O’ Byrne, 129. 159 O’ Byrne, 129.
78 our memory, and our ability to directly articulate its influence. But, cautions O’Brynne, “the immemorial that lies behind, beyond, and before identity is not exactly unrepresentable.
Although it cannot be seen or said, it is what we tend toward all the time; it emerges obliquely, if not in philosophy then certainly in the maelstrom of lived experience.”160 Natality establishes our maximal and deepest dependence on others, though later reflectivity and independence may come to overlay and obscure that reliance. While we cannot speak directly of our natality, it makes all our speaking possible, and speaks through us unawares.
2.5. A rapprochement between Ricoeur and Levinas requires a supra-verbal knowledge – much like the sensibility through which we gain the craft of metaphor. Natality teaches us that we are affected by what we testify to; it is just that our testimony is not reducible to ordinary knowledge. How may we speak of this effect, as we attempt to reconcile Ricoeur and Levinas? We submit that there is, at least, an analogy. When a place is filled with sound, it may be said to resound. When I testify, when I am filled to responding with
“here I Am” – the words of response to the inarticulable Infinite – I may be said to resound as well. If the union of the soul and the body is the animation of the same by the other, if my appearance, my very presence itself is being for the other, then can the other not be said to be the breath that inspires me? That fills my flesh with life? Can I not resound, then, with you?
We testify through our responsive presentation: here I am, I am the Saying that you speak through. Yet it is not our language that is testimony. Nor can we say that our testimony is
Ricoeurian attestation, in its sense of trusting that I can, as a subject, act – even if we act in a world of others. We might speak instead of an allusion, as in a piece of literature referring to,
160 O’ Byrne, 114–15.
79 without naming, another work. One thinks, again, of one’s birth and early years. When we ask children what they think about current events, we expect to receive their parents’ views on politics, not their own. What does one call this but a kind of allusive attestation? Not because the children understand their parents’ views, but precisely because they so freely don’t. Allusive attestation presents its influences without necessarily naming them, perhaps even being unaware of them. Allusive attestation attests to others precisely because it is the presentation of the self – not the self-understanding-itself but the self begun, inescapably, immemorially, in others. We have seen precisely this phenomenon when we recalled how poets learn their craft from master poets. When poets adopt the way another person understands the world, the process is so thorough that the apprentice likely cannot trace every nuance of the master’s influence.
Likewise, the author cannot fully explain his inspirations. And in the broader public, the testimony of ancestors flows through generations, producing understanding.
2.6. The Levinasian other as the interruption that inaugurates the self’s moral responsibility begins the self elsewhere than Ricoeur does – it does not contradict it
We have learned from Levinas – and, with a twist, natality – that the other must always and already interrupt the same – not because same and other are alienated, but because the inarticulable other makes the narrating self possible in the first place. Ricoeur might thus learn from Levinas a subjectivity that entails a corrective understanding of the other. If Ricoeur is going to be able to distinguish others as people, and not as simply aids or impediments in my world, then the other must be to some degree non-narratable, but not untouchable, because we
80 ourselves are always already “touched” by others. Ricoeur must make some accounting for the non-narrated or interrupting influence of alterity.161
Such an accounting is possible. It is simply that other and self must be considered as a particular sequence, because that sequence matters. This emphasis on precedence might not be what readers of either Ricoeur or Levinas would expect. It is not that Ricoeur must let his understanding of alterity wax while subjectivity wanes. One in our consideration is not made greater; the other is not made less. Instead, we might consider our rapproachment a kind of liberation of Ricoeurian subjectivity. In Ricoeur’s understanding, the self precedes the other in the order of thinking. This is, without doubt, a legacy of his embarking upon phenomenology in a Husserlian, Kantian, and Cartesian vein, and is not itself an error. It is simply a beginning, and everyone must start somewhere, and with certain assumptions. But other beginnings are possible, and Levinasian subjectivity begins with the other rather than the self, a point Ricoeur himself seems to have misunderstood.162 But this origin in the other is entirely consistent with Levinas’s reading of the Jewish Bible, to which he traces the roots of his emphasis on ethics over metaphysics. Ricoeur would not be inconsistent with his own Christianity, then, to adopt it.
The disagreement between Ricoeur and Levinas is, largely, originary: “Levinas’s entire philosophy rests on the initiative of the other in the intersubjective relation,” cites Richard Cohen in response to Ricoeur.163 For Ricoeur, putting all ethical initiative in the face of the other erodes mutuality and denies the possibility of real relationship.164 Because it denies reciprocity,
Levinasian alterity, in Ricoeur’s understanding, in fact establishes no link between self and other
161 Henderikus J. Stam, “Narration and Life: On the Possibilities of a Narrative Psychology,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 81–81. 162 Cohen, “Moral Selfhood,” 138. 163 Cohen, 130. 164 Cohen, 130.
81 at all.165 What the face of the other inaugurates instead is a breach. So not only has Levinas put sociality before morality, a stance Ricoeur also disagrees with, he also makes any relationship impossible and denies a dialectical understanding of alterity.166
Levinas is trying to show that the self and other are always already both in and out of relation.167 He is not attempting to define or describe the relation between self and other in the first place. Instead, he is trying to provide the very definition of ethics, and the source of moral problems. Second, Levinas is trying to demonstrate why the self should act on behalf of the other at all: “no one is good voluntarily.”168 Given their respective experiences of the Second World
War, both Ricoeur and Levinas would have been correct to see a problem with an argument that relies, as Ricoeur’s does, upon a “benevolent spontaneity” toward others. So Levinas has moral development be more foundational: “humanity and moral humanity rise together.”169 In the face of the other, moral society and subjectivity co-inhere. Without others, not only could one not live the good life, one also could not think of it.170 The concept would simply be empty.
Thus the absolute call of the face of the other, which seems to Ricoeur to be a fissure, a breach not only between self and other, but also a shattering of the self by the other, can rightly be understood as the foundation of a capacity of the self to act. The Levinasian passivity of the self is more passive than simple passivity. In the face of the other, the Levinasian self is able to respond: “here I am.”171 In the face of the other and only in the face of the other, I am response- able. That the call of the other can never be finally answered by the self does not mean that the
165 Cohen, 130. 166 Cohen, 130. 167 Cohen, 131. 168 Cohen, 132. 169 Cohen, 133. 170 Cohen, 134. 171 Cohen, 134.
82 self is powerless to act at all. Indeed, this Levinasian understanding of subjectivity can sound more than a bit like Ricoeur’s non-masterful human capability at the end of Memory, History,
Forgetting:
What he (Kierkegaard) will learn from the lilies is that “they do not work.” Are we then to understand that even the work of memory and the work of mourning are to be forgotten? And if they “do not spin” either, their mere existence being their adornment, are we to understand that man, too ‘without working, without spinning, without meritoriousness, is more serious than Solomon’s glory by being a human being?’ And the birds ‘sow not and reap not and gather not into barns’.172
The vision of the ‘carefree’ man at the end of Ricoeur’s work, while not embracing the ethical call of the face of the other in Levinasian fashion, has nonetheless arrived at a point beyond striving, not through the satisfaction of a work complete, but because it has forgotten the anxieties and burdens of too much of daily life. Since forgetting is something arrived at nearly always without intention, this seems an example of a passive capacity in the Ricoeurian corpus.
After all, the power to receive can itself be quite potent, as the Aristotelian in Ricoeur well knows, and which he accuses the Levinasian self of lacking. But Levinas is tracing not the erosion of the self’s receptivity but its genesis, and not the abyss opened between self and other but the very depths of their relation.
For Levinas, the self’s primary relation to the other is not narratological but genealogical.
And in genealogies, the self’s first bonds are not with itself but are instead conditioned by mother, father, and siblings. A reader of Torah, he is tracing familial relation. The self is born, created, rather than posited. So it is not that the Levinasian self lacks a capacity of reception, as
Ricoeur claims. Rather, it is simply that this capacity is not its own. Receptivity is not a gift the self can give to itself – but this doesn’t mean it can’t exist! It simply comes from others.
172 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 505.
83 So we see that the disagreement between Ricoeur and Levinas about alterity is less a logical contradiction and more a variance of descriptions at differing levels of meaning, intent, and originary position. But there are differences, and those differences do matter. Each thinker’s understanding of alterity shapes the story he tells about the self. Ricoeur starts his search for the self within the self for epistemic, philosophical reasons: the self in the West has long been the origin of knowing, and Ricoeur’s notion of alterity marks a good correction to that assumption.
Yet, we might add that, although Levinas may not have come to our understanding, our structure of natality-conditioned subjectivity does provide a concrete, biographical reason for an inescapable, Levinasian moral call following from the face of another. It would seem, indeed it has likely seemed to most people throughout history, that we owe something to those who care for us – form us – during our most crucial and vulnerable years. Yet this must be a debt that we cannot, strictly speaking, repay. The most formative years of our caregivers have long passed by the time we are at all able to care for them. We cannot shape them in the same way or to the same degree that they have formed us. But Levinas begins his disruption of the self within the other for ethical reasons that also have good empirical support: in biological terms, each of us during pregnancy literally begins inside the other, in utero. We cannot reciprocate; we owe a debt we cannot, by its very nature, repay. In terms we ourselves have introduced, we may say that one suffers before one grows, and that humans belong before we become. This much
Ricoeur can learn from Levinas.
2.7. Reconciling Ricoeur and Levinas becomes possible if we allow conditioned subjectivity to precede the later, reflective subjectivity that Ricoeur so powerfully unfolds.
We have seen that when Ricoeur and Levinas disagree about testimony, it is in large part because they are talking about its different kinds. Ricoeur, it seems, is largely concerned with the
84 powers of articulation, with the force and weight of words – which are undeniably significant.
Levinas, however, is concerned with the limits of language itself – to moral obligations we have at the deeper level that evokes language in the first place. Thus, Ricoeurian testimony is narrative testimony, the active work of a human agent engaged in ordering the events of his or her experience. Levinasian testimony, however, is the passive effect upon a human being experiencing the weight of inescapable moral obligation. It does not seem to us impossible that such testimonies can co-exist. Indeed, in a reasonable understanding of how language limns our being in the world, they already do.
It is because language “bumps up against” the inexpressible that it can say anything at all.
And it does so for a specific reason. Words devoid of the possibility of misunderstanding would be, at best, unnecessary tautologies. And even to invoke the requirement of understandability is to invoke the presence of another person into the linguistic fold: one can hardly not understand what one has just said, as the framework of Ricoeurian attestation rightly assumes. Words are spoken for others from the very get-go. Ricoeur’s own grounding of all language in discourse
(through its origin in metaphor) attests to this truth. Rhetors demand an audience – and thus appear before someone to whom they owe the obligation of, at least, attempted intelligibility.
One might consider, then, the ways in which rhetors are summoned by their audience, as opposed to producing it. One cannot persuade oneself. The fundamental Aristotelian structure of rhetoric popularly summarized in logos, pathos, and ethos consists of three fundamental loci: the speaker, the subject, and the audience.173 As Aristotle writes, “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the
173 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. II. 8-9.
85 third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” This fundamental entwining of speaker and audience in the forms of persuasive speech resembles a possible summary of Levinasian subjectivity in which subjectivity forms by being presented before, and subject to, others. The social reality of subjectivity is highlighted even more in the marketplace, Ricoeur’s celebrated wheelhouse of metaphor. Sellers appeal to, rather than command, the emotions of the crowd. They certainly cannot rely upon masterful self-reflection, but instead respond to others as potential buyers. We find precisely this obligation in their appeals when we see their rhetoric slanted, through diction and other means, for different crowds. There is every reason to believe that such influence continues when one transitions from metaphor to narrative, or, within a Ricoeurian framework, from narrative to biography.
So we see that allusive attestation – that is, our resounding with the influence of and obligation to others – must come first in our understanding, because it comes first in our experience. It comes, to be sure, before we ourselves do. Now we should be clear and say that the resounding we speak of is not identical to the obligation that Levinas describes. Levinas writes of our moral obligation to answer another’s cry of distress. Such obligation, if we use evolutionary terms, would be primordial indeed, appealing to our nascent instincts to protect kin and tribe, which could well have come before language in a very empirical sense, though
Levinas would not make the distinction between stranger and kin that our instincts do. But we are speaking of our formation as persons in a more general sense, as in parents “bringing up” children or masters training their apprentices. Such resounding may differ from the Levinasian kind, though ours seems no less primordial – chimpanzees teach skills, and bonobos raise children. So it seems we may have a primordial obligation to positively nurture as much as we
86 have one to answer distress, and that this obligation extends to our children as themselves, and not as simple egoistic extensions of ourselves.
What we intend to borrow and modify from Levinas, then, is the experiential structure of resounding, because it supplements Ricoeur’s thought in a way that Ricoeur himself neglected.
Ricoeur’s commitment to the power of words prevents him from emphasizing that we have – indeed, we are constituted by – knowledge that language cannot express, but by which we are also formed and to which we are obliged. Our debt is so not because it is a hostile burden imposed by an alien other, as Levinas’ harshest critics would have it, but because, simply, we ourselves are the resounding. We are our appearing before others in the world. As we gain our own voice and develop our own skills, we are not only this appearing, but we are first and inescapably this presentation of ourselves before those who care for us. Throughout our lives, we bear the mark and seal of those among whom we have lived.
While this idea of precedence comports with an essentially Levinasian way of understanding the self, we would fill out the picture of the self somewhat differently than
Levinas does. Levinas begins, as we would not, with Descartes, whose idea of the “Infinite put into me,” that is also “contemporaneous with my creation,” grants a positive relationship of the self to the Infinite – an awareness, one supposes, of not knowing.174 The relationship to the
Infinite also, Levinas notes, grants the “I” a “passivity more passive still than any passivity because it is from the first in the accusative – oneself (soi) – and never was in the nominative; it is under the accusation of the other, even if it be faultless.”175 So it is not as though the other ever does or ever could take something away from or threaten the self, because there is already no
174 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 175. 175 Levinas, 178.
87 moment when the I is not under the other’s accusation. In fact, the “I” as we experience it has always and already been accused and brought into a “wakefulness or openness to oneself” that
“is completely exposed, and sobered up from the ecstasy of intentionality.”176
Thus one can see that despite the negative – and possibly hyperbolic – overtones of some of Levinas’s language, the structure of Levinasian thinking is essentially positive regarding a precedence of alterity: contemporary with the “I” at the moment of its creation and “put into me,” the idea of the Infinite awakens me out of the sleep of intentionality and “compels me to goodness, which is better than the goods received.”177 This does not mean, of course, that all the choices of the “I” will be ethical, but that the good the “I” chooses will not be its own; indeed, nothing will be solely one’s own:
The passivity of such an exposure to the other is not exhausted in some sort of being open to the other’s look or objectifying judgement. The openness of the ego being exposed to the other is the breakup or turning inside out of inwardness. Sincerity is the name of this exta-version. But what else can this... mean but a responsibility... such that everything in me is debt and donation and such that my position as subject in its as for me is already my substitution or expiation for others.178
Now clearly we make no claim here with regard to whether or not Levinas’s reading of Descartes is correct, or whether or not there is an idea of the Infinite “put into us” in the way that Descartes imagines and Levinas here seems to endorse. We need note only whether or not Levinas establishes a structure where alterity can precede the formation of the self within the self, whether or not that precedence is necessarily hostile or negating, and whether or not Levinas conceives of a self that is oriented toward alterity as a very matter of its constitution. From the above quotes, the answers to these questions seem to be yes, no, and yes. The Levinasian passivity beyond passivity is a burden that attunes us to the claims of others. Thus, though we
176 Levinas, 178. 177 Levinas, 179. 178 Levinas, 182–83.
88 may quibble with how Levinas fills out this structure elsewhere, and need not keep his ethical absolutism, we agree with both his thinking here and with how Ricoeur seems to imagine alterity functioning in the construction of metaphor, described in our first chapter: alterity is a fundamental and orienting condition – of metaphor for Ricoeur, and of subjectivity for Levinas.
But for our resounding to follow from Levinas, of course, we will go one step further, and show that there is some real expression of the self’s fundamental and indebted orientation toward the other. Fortunately, this is perhaps the clearest point we can take from Levinas, in that the expression of one’s indebted orientation is the famous ‘saying’:
The devotion for the other is not shut up in itself like a state of soul, but is itself from the start given over to the other. This excess is saying... saying makes signs to the other, but in this sign signifies the very giving of signs. Saying opens me to the other before saying what is said…, this saying without a said is thus like silence. It is without words, but not with hands empty.179
So Levinas certainly seems to think that our orientation toward others precedes the said, and indeed, that speech is an indication of, and indeed is conditioned by, that orientation. We agree with Levinas that we all resound, yet would allow for expressions of our indebtedness that are neither speech nor silence; gesture, posture, perspective, and sensibility (among others) are all manifestations not only of what we intend, but of how others have formed us. And Levinas himself seems to endorse the reality of non-verbal expressions of indebtedness when he discusses, of all things, the transmission of Judaism, itself a difficult subject to define. As he writes: “For millions of Israelites who have been assimilated into the civilization around them,
Judaism cannot even be called a culture: it is a vague sensibility made up of various ideas, memories, customs and emotions, together with a feeling of solidarity towards those Jews who
179 Levinas, 183.
89 were persecuted for being Jews.”180 Yet he asserts that, nonetheless, “Judaism has a special essence: it is something that is laid down in square letters and something that illuminates living faces; it is both ancient document and contemporary history.”181 Because of this duality, Judaism
“has always wished to be a simultaneous engagement and disengagement” as personified in the most ‘deeply committed’ figure of the prophet, who “is also the most separate being, and the one least capable of becoming an institution.”182 Suffice it to say that Judaism as Levinas describes it relies upon persons, at least as much as upon words, for its transmission and dissemination.
The location of the transmission of Judaism in the prophet intrigues us as readers of
Ricoeur, who also understand the mimesis present in the transmission of a sensibility. For, as
Levinas writes:
This essential content, which history cannot touch, cannot be learned like a catechism or resumed like a credo. Nor is it restricted to the negative and formal statement of a categorical imperative. It cannot be replaced by Kantianism, nor, to an even lesser degree, can it be obtained from some particular privilege or racial miracle. It is acquired through a way of living that is a ritual and a heart-felt generosity, wherein a human fraternity and an attention to the present are reconciled with an eternal distance in relation to the contemporary world.183
Clearly, we agree with Levinas that there is a relation, an effect of persons on one another, and most specifically an effect that the other can have on the self that is not knowledge as philosophy has understood it. It is instead, like Judaism for Levinas, a sensibility, a way of living and understanding that passes from one person to another via means that are both verbal and non- verbal. This effect, therefore, is not bound to language or contingent on our ability to articulate our concepts about it.
180 Emmanuel Levinas, “Difficult Freedom,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Hand, Sean (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 250. Emphasis mine. 181 Levinas, 251. 182 Levinas, 257. 183 Levinas, 257.
90 One may ask at this point: so what? Should philosophy not pass over in silence that of which it cannot speak?184 And many of course have. But to say that some knowledge is non- verbal or extra-verbal is not to say that it does not evoke speech, with which philosophy can very much be concerned. Resounding is not knowledge, and is thus not bound to language. However, resounding does produce language, and some of its effects can thus be subject to philosophical investigation, though they could not be exhausted by it.
One obvious arena of inquiry about the effect of a sensibility that resounds between persons is whether or not there is a verbal testimony that can more readily express our undeniable relation to others, and that can more readily expose the imprint of those who have taught us.185 It is telling, perhaps, that Levinas so often turned to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov, a highly innovative and metaphorical novel, when making moral appeals. It may be that testimonies which bear more metaphor, and which use more of the artfulness of language that Ricoeur so prizes, can better elaborate the sensibility, the knowledge that is not knowledge, the resounding which attunes us, that passes between persons. And it is to more imaginative sorts of testimony that we now turn.
2.8. Imaginative testimony would – through mood, tone and other elements – present a more open self than confessional, history-driven narrative could. Literature abounds with narratives in which the imagination runs more freely than in history as such. These narratives may give us back ourselves precisely by focusing their attention elsewhere than the self, on the experience that subjects encounter. And we may understand them by describing narrative genres as what they are: different patterns of imagining experience. That is, regardless of how one defines genre, readers come to understand they are reading a particular genre by referring to certain contextual cues that they then use to extrapolate – imagine – the
184 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, Ltd., 1922), 90, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf. 185 Neil Van Leeuwen, “The Meanings of ‘Imagine’ Part 1: Constructive Imagination,” Philosphy Compass 8, no. 3 (March 2013): 228.
91 nature of the whole.186 Which genre we imagine we are reading will shape the narrative we finally understand. Would this not be true of our personal narratives as well?
Even within any particular genre, we may recall that the polysemic vitality of metaphor allows us to better encounter a rich, dynamic, multi-faceted reality than literal language does. It also, we believe Levinas would allow, better aligns with the complexities of a human experience that resists encapsulation by any language, let alone that confined to a dictionary. Why, then should our verbal testimonies not follow the path of metaphor, as much as the confessional route of history? Our experience is itself imagined, including events in history. This is not so because we disregard the real, but because our imagination is one of the ways in which we welcome it.
For though we can sharpen or neglect our imaginative capacities, we cannot turn them off. One cannot have an un-imagined perception, or experience. So if we are going to cast about looking for kinds of narrative that can better embrace a multi-dimensional, “thickness” of experience, we can surely do worse than turning to imaginative forms.
We might imagine, for ourselves, a form of testimony, of history, that is itself imaginative, that changes the way we tell the past. After all, Ricoeur rightly poses that we owe a debt to the dead. And this debt is to remember them and speak on their behalf. Yet history as such does not seem fully satisfactory, because it does not grapple with the imagined experience of the real dead. They too were once the subjects of experience they could not wholly articulate.
If we are to speak on their behalf we must unhinge ourselves in time; we must translate and conjugate ourselves into their tense. One way to do this is to imagine how things could have happened differently – after all, the dead certainly did. But this seems the only way we can tell
186 Aristotle, for example, refers to distinguishing poetry and tragedy and comedy as they differ from each other “in three ways, either by a difference of kind in their means, or differences in the objects, or in the manner of their imitations.” Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. Ingram Bywater. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, (New York: The Modern Library, 2001.) 1147a15.
92 the possibilities they once experienced as present. After all, the impersonal past was something that they, too, never got to experience. Imaginative testimony seems a reliable way of paying the debt we owe the dead.
To argue, as we do, that one ought to prefer an understanding of the self as poetic as well as historical, one has to argue for the presence of poetic elements in human identity. Fortunately, this does not seem overwhelmingly difficult to do. We may even call upon Aristotle for support, as his commitment to taxonomy, his conviction that different genres in fact suit different occasions, taken together with his elaboration of what rules poetry ought to rightly follow, implies that he deems poetry necessary to some real and referential purpose that other genres do not accomplish. One of his rules, that poetry does not only concern the tragedy, typically, of the dead, but also considers the comedy or satire of the living, seems an interesting place to start to understand the poetry he intends to encourage.
Comedy, in the Aristotelian sense, aims at depicting men as worse than they are, whereas tragedy aims at showing them as better than they were.187 It might be said that one rarely mocks the dead, because it is not proper, while only sycophants unduly praise the living. But we must note that both are options unique to poetry. History, by contrast, respecting its debt to the dead, must report them as they were – whether or not the dead are worthy of respect themselves.188
Anything else, presumably, is either slander or propaganda. But the living have the ability to be inspired, or to despair. This is the function of poetic narrative, and why we might include it in
187 As Aristotle himself puts it: “From what we have said it will be seen that the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse – you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals whereas those of history are singulars.” Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1451b-1451b15. 188 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79.
93 our own formation. The one certainty about the stories I tell about myself is that they are anything but an objective description of how I am. When I report my actions, my judgments about myself are always already entangled with my motivations, not only when I acted, but now as I disclose my narrative.
So the stories I tell about myself organize events both by their experiential structure and by who I imagine I am as I tell the story. Depending on who I feel I am, I will likely present myself as either better or worse than others experience me to be. As it seems impossible that I will be able to remove the bias of my identity, there may be good reason to consider my bias a part of myself. I can and do easily understand my life as a comedy or tragedy in the Aristotelian sense; it is at least somewhat awkward to attempt to understand it as a proper history in the
Aristotelian vein. And my sense of that possibility, to be greater or less than myself, opens a horizon of possibility that brute historical recording closes down. This is the very value of imagining oneself other-wise. Perish the thought that I can be only what I have done or endured or intend! Though we should not rely upon imaginative testimony alone, we owe the living the greater possibilities that lively metaphorical narrative implies – and that an honest reckoning with the human experience of that history allows.
This is no less true for ourselves, and the experience we have more personally. We should perhaps consider that as an act, telling a story is never neutral but always inflecting – especially the elements we don’t intend! If we can betray ourselves through narrative for good and ill, it may follow that even our most personal narratives can still surprise us. In telling one’s own story, one can realize that he or she is better or worse than previously imagined. As in the case of Freudian slips, it is in our very fallibility as witnesses that we might disclose some of the
94 greatest truths about ourselves – hence the advent in literature of the unreliable narrator, an occurrence which Aristotle unfortunately does not address.
Strange as it may sound, there may well be descriptive and narrative benefit not only in telling things as other than they are or were, but also in relating events as they might have been.
And we may say certainly that an unreliable poet has more reliability than an unreliable historian, so long as the faults or limitations of the comedic or tragic disclose more of the truth than a bungled historical telling could have done. There might indeed be epistemic virtue in telling lies that, like metaphor, do not intend to deceive. After all, we rightly judge ourselves not only by the actions we impute to ourselves, but also by the possibilities we did not realize, the field of gaps and omissions and slights within which the emplotment of our lives occurs. To be sure, our lives as such are ready to be historicized and narrated, but they are also ready to resist the closure that confessional narrative forces upon events.
After all, we are not only what we have done, or even what we expect to happen in the future, but, in a unique way, we are also what we are experiencing right now, the time when possibilities are becoming actual, and we have not been utterly determined. The recalcitrance of experience to bow to the dominion of language refers most readily to the present, which the poetic is more disposed to recognize than the historic. Yet imaginative testimony might possess the same virtue of imagination that we do whenever we narrate our lives.
For us, it does not only matter what happened or how we acted or even what our reasons or emotions were, just as narratives themselves do not solely consist of plot or characterization, but also irreducibly include dialogue, mood, and tone. We do not tell our own stories to ourselves solely to acknowledge what happened, but also to realize again what it was like for us.
Such elements, difficult to convey via a bare recital or summary of a plot, emerge precisely in
95 the way the plot and characters unfold along with us, and not in the plot and characters themselves – otherwise it would be as satisfying to read summaries of novels, movies, and television programs as it would be to experience the things ourselves. Similarly, a dry recital of the raw events in our lives, however factually accurate, however comprehensive in scope and theme, would fail if it failed to convey in some form the this-ness of our past experience, the setting and mood in which we experience our lives.
Perhaps this is how the recovering addicts of Alcoholics Anonymous come to understand their disease as gift: to believe that we are not only our stories means that the tragedies of the past, however clearly recalled, can now be imagined as steps on the path that have lead us to a healthy life. On a historical basis, this is not accurate thinking, and confuses causality with consequence. The disease was killing them, and they have stopped its course and returned to health. That is what happened. But, to many in recovery, what happened does not fit their experience or their understanding of it; that is not what it was like. Though the course of events remains the same, our present circumstance changes the mood and tone of the past from despair to acceptance and sometimes gratitude. What it was like, often, was that I was on a journey to a different place than I intended. And now that I’m here in this place I never thought I’d be, I think about the entirety of my voyage in an entirely different way.
2.9. Imaginative testimony may re-capitulate the self as an appearance before others in the world, revealing more about the self than it intends to selectively portray
It is unclear to us how much Ricoeur’s account of narrative allows for such imaginative genres as comedy, mystery, and poetry in historical testimony. Certainly, he maintains the
Aristotelian distinction between history and fiction when he broaches the subject in Time and
96 Narrative. He writes of the historical connection that calendars demark between personal and impersonal temporality, and writes that he hopes to revive the signification attached to the word
“reality” when referring to the past. His summative statement is that history “stands for” the past.189 In a parallel but different sense, fiction, the poetic world of the text, “stands for” the world of the present with all its possibilities. History and fiction do not, it seems, bear the same dual relation to time, both public and private. Fictive time is private time instead of public time; reading fiction unhinges us in time, so that we are transported to the time of the world of the text.
This movement of fictive time is entirely different from history’s aporia between public and private time. Indeed, Ricoeur lauds fiction precisely for its contribution to philosophy’s understanding of the non-linearity of phenomenological time.190
One must wonder then, if testimony might also benefit from this same understanding.
After all, the time that we currently experience is not necessarily linear. Indeed it cannot be if the present does not circumscribe its own past and future, if it is simply present to us. This is true not only for our current selves, but for our past selves as well; they did not experience the past but rather their own present. One imagines that we owe them not only the disclosure of what happened and what they did, but also what it was like in that moment, the mood and tone of the times as well as the dates and times themselves.
Memory alone balks at the task of recalling what it was like, because the present, whenever experienced, also includes imagination. We are also what we imagine happening to us, whether it actually occurs or not; my imaginings, like my memories, are uniquely mine, though
189 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 191. 190 As he elaborates: “We must not stop with a simplistic opposition between clock time and internal time, therefore, but must consider the variety of relations between the concrete temporal experience of various characters and monumental time. The variations on the theme of this relation lead fiction well beyond the abstract opposition we have just referred to and make of it, for the reader, a powerful means of detecting the infinitely varied way of combining the perspectives of time that speculation by itself fails to mediate.” Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 2, 108.
97 we all may have imaginations and collectively remember – and forget, as Riceour thoroughly chronicles in Memory, History, Forgetting.191 Not only do memories sometimes misrepresent the past, we always misrepresent the present, even to ourselves, and in unique and telling ways. This too should be part of the telling of our story, if we are able to convey what it is like to experience.
Clearly, one would find unsatisfying the memoir that contains only fantasy. But those who write eulogies may find equally unsatisfying the narrative that contains only the summary of a plot. Rather, those who tell jokes and apply telling anecdotes in such situations, as at some wakes, reveal what it was like to be with that person – and thus what they were like themselves.
If one misses the factuality of such reports, if details of the story are wrong or spurious, if entire events are fabricated wholesale, is truth still not present if the story tells something that the dead might well actually have said or done? One might even disclose truth about another person through caricature, making people out to be better or worse than they actually were. Such disclosure is the function of both tragedy and comedy in the Aristotelian sense, and deserves to be within our own powers as narrators of our experience.
Our assertion is only that imaginative testimony communicates experience in a way which historical testimony cannot, because experience itself is imaginary in a way that history qua history attempts to eliminate. We realize that we have not summoned all the possible evidence on behalf of this argument, which concludes that imaginary testimony better captures the this-ness of experience, perhaps particularly the ultimately supra-linguistic resounding in which all persons live, whether we are aware of it or not. But we also realize that our argument
191 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting.
98 contains the same mimetic base as Aristotle’s – and Ricoeur’s. We are still, in the end, trying to say that testimony “works” because it reflects experience.
2.10. Ultimately, we can use Levinas to supplement Ricoeur’s understanding of historically narrated subjectivity by grounding the self’s origins in immemorial natality
Through his treatment of metaphor, Ricoeur shows us that language, rather than simply describing the world to us as we see it, can expand our own perceptions and guide us to a greater understanding of truth than we initially thought possible. That is the conclusion of his magnificent The Rule of Metaphor, whose final, culminating studies deal with how language refers, and how poetic language affects philosophy. The technical sophistication of the work might actually obscure Ricoeur’s more radical re-thinking of one of philosophy’s most basic conundrums: what can and should language accomplish?
Ricoeur understands metaphor as a potent example of language’s expansive power because of its polysemic vitality – that is, each metaphor’s lively refusal, by dint of its many meanings, to be reduced to one definition. Thus, he links rhetor and audience in metaphor in the very structure of its possibility as well as in the unfolding of its meaning. Far from referring to one object, metaphors present, rather than describe, an entire miniature scene – for the audience to whom they are addressed. Metaphor, by virtue of its definition, invokes and involves more than one person.
The interpersonal nature of metaphor in its theoretical origins should lead us to expect more than one person to be involved in its practical origins as well. Indeed, if language unfolds our world in the way that Ricoeur argues, it would seem nearly impossible for anyone to stumble upon our metaphor entirely by themselves – as language is something we are so manifestly given
99 – by our parents, by our teachers, and by the traditions that surround us. Through language, we
“see” the world as others have “seen” it.
Far from being thus confined to a relativism without foundation, if we understand metaphor as an artisanal skill, a techne akin to pottery or painting, we see that others can be reliable guides to seeing the world in a particular way – transmitting to us a sensibility that reveals truths we had not previously considered. Ricoeur may have missed this possibility following Aristotle’s understanding of metaphor as passive genius, but science has shown us that perception must be taught. So it is with metaphor: we rely on the successful skill of others.
Of course, we are not thus limited to only seeing what others have seen. If the art of metaphor is a kind of mimicry of the way someone more skillful has seen the world, it is also, as mimicry, a kind of innovative play. Being born in others, metaphor is also given to them as a question: can you see this way too? Because metaphor suggests a likeness, it does not have to prove it. It simply allows others to make the connection for themselves, just as the author of the metaphor once did. This two-sided playfulness grants metaphor much of its vitality.
Ricoeur’s case for metaphor being a driving force of understanding, as well as his consideration of narrative as the logical extension of metaphor, suggests that Ricoeur’s account of narrative ought to carry over metaphor’s most important qualities. Yet in our second chapter, we find instead that Ricoeur’s focus on the temporality of narrative, particularly its coherent organizing of events in plot, overtakes not only vitality and polysemy, but also the potency of metaphor itself. Ricoeur moves from a rhetorical model of discourse playfully linking rhetor and audience to a historical model of discourse in which a narrator focuses on causes and events. It is the latter model that endures as Ricoeur begins to make his case for an identity founded on confessional narrative: I am the stories I tell about myself.
100 By way of contrast, we have noted that Emmanuel Levinas argues that the self is one who, being grounded in moral obligation, faces outward, presenting itself before others, and testifying on their behalf, though the words they say will never suffice. Yet this last question of language may be key to resolving the sharp contrast and apparent impasse between the two thinkers, as it seems as though Ricoeur focuses on a self made capable by language, and Levinas finds a self pressed beyond the utterance and into moral action. Could our two thinkers not then be framing subjectivity in two different contexts, and could we not reconcile some of their difference by saying that one may follow the other?
We have found that we can find a rapprochement, to the extent that developmental science shows that the Levinasian portrayal of a self appearing before, to, and to a great extent by the lights of others describes early childhood, when infants appear in a world that is not their own. In response to others, we form our first self-impressions and learn to order our own emotional processes: the very bedrock of the stories we will eventually begin to tell. This dependency on others from our very earliest moments underscores their precedence. Our
Levinasian summons by others allows us to speak into being our more mature, capable
Ricoeurian selves. We have called this precedence natality, as the word invokes a period crucial to our formation during which we are utterly dependent on others and which we nonetheless are unable to recall, let alone narrate.
Natality suggests that we are formed in ways we cannot verbally express. But the way to expression is not here fully closed. Metaphor’s origin as techne has taught us that we can receive the sensibilities of others – indeed that we will inevitably do so. This must be no less true of those sensibilities we have acquired from those who have nurtured us in other aspects: we will inevitably reflect them. We resound with the influence of others in the way we express ourselves,
101 as in the selves we choose to express. Simply by being who we are, we testify to others. Indeed, we find we are the testimony.
Since Levinas develops his account of testimony of response from a witness that is perhaps even beyond the bounds of language, while Ricoeur very much grounds his account of confessional testimony in a witness that is capably verbal, we may wonder if there is yet any sort of testimony at all that allows us to better understand a subjectivity pressed near or past the limit of language’s capacity. We have argued that such testimony in fact exists, as evident in the case of narratives that are closely linked to imagination: magical realism, comedy, and caricature all present an experience that is “thicker” than a bare confessional, historical narrative would allow.
In this thickness, imaginative narratives may actually provide more reliable accountings of subjectivity than the history we confess. But before we can propose an understanding of the self that is more reliant on metaphor and alterity than it is on confessional narrative and reflective subjectivity, we must consider the reflecting, narrating – and, particularly, attesting – self that
Ricoeur does present.
102 CHAPTER THREE:
ATTESTATION’S ADDRESS
3.1. Understanding metaphor as discourse allows us to consider it as a moment of shared cognitive reality required at every level of language and personal development Now having surveyed both Ricoeur on metaphor and both Ricoeur and Levinas on testimony, we can begin to move toward a deeper rapprochement between the two thinkers as we delve into our third chapter, a study of attestation and its relationship to the self and to alterity.
Our original problem, we recall, was to understand the unfinished Ricoeurian business of how the capacity for metaphor comes to be. But we saw from Levinas that the Ricoeurian business of how the self comes to be is similarly unfinished, though we hope to show that Ricoeur’s concept of attestation makes some inroads toward completing the self’s origin. Our proposed rapprochement will attempt to use a Levinasian, primordial call of the other to further complete the notion of attestation in such a way that Ricoeur might find congenial to his ultimate position.
We can build this rapprochement in four steps. The first we have already partially established in our first chapter, in that metaphor bears a structure of primordial alterity. At a primordial level, metaphor requires the presence of an audience (overt or applied) as the very condition of its origin. This much can be inferred from Ricoeur’s own definition of metaphor: it is difficult to imagine one being able to use non-literal speech as a deliberate category mistake if one has no sense of another person who is able to perceive either the error or its intent. One cannot create Ricoeurian metaphor for one’s own amusement; when one speaks to oneself, there is little chance that one will be surprised by the connection one has just made – and if this does occur, it must be from the self’s differentiation in time, where the self that reflects upon the metaphor is “ahead” of the self that speaks it. Structurally, primordially, metaphor as Ricoeur
103 understands it requires an audience, an other, alterity. The same is true of metaphor on another level, in that the capacity to make metaphor requires a primordial alterity as well; we have seen that poets learn by imitating other poets, much as children learn language itself by imitating proficient speakers.
What we would like to add in this third chapter is the notion that metaphor requires primodial alterity on still another level, in that the event of the metaphor itself, and not only its origin or its definition, also requires alterity at a fundamental level, in that metaphor in its most common context is a shared cognitive experience. While speaker and hearer can disagree about a metaphor’s meaning, the metaphor itself is in serious trouble if either of them does not believe it to have been a metaphor. Both must have experienced a congruent mental event if the metaphor is going to continue to live; a metaphor that strikes one as lively and another as cliché is one on its way to public death, a dying word.
Considering this larger context of metaphor brings us to the second step of this chapter’s argument, and that is to understand the way that discourse shares metaphor’s structure as a shared cognitive event. Discourse requires both a speaker and a hearer, and metaphor has the characteristics that it does because it is a type of discourse. Discourse, says Ricoeur, is when someone says something to someone about something.192 Now, as Ricoeur implies elsewhere, I can have no confusion about the identity of a metaphor’s author once I, myself, have authored it.193 Neither is there confusion on the hearer’s part about who has understood such a metaphor.
192 I am here taking the argument from Oneself as Another that acts are imputable or attributable to a person, and applying it as though speaking were an act and metaphors a particular kind of speaking – all of which I presume Ricoeur would grant. 193 “Understanding is entirely mediated by the whole of explanatory procedures that precede it (italics mine) and accompany it. The counterpoint of this personal appropriation is not something that can be felt, it is the dynamic meaning released by the explanation which we identified earlier with the reference of the text, that is, its power of disclosing a world.” Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,
104 He or she has heard it. The agency of that experience is theirs, just as the agency of creation was my own. This linking of “possession” or ownership of an act or activity is Ricoeur’s notion of attribution, which he lays out in the beginning sections of Oneself as Another. Yet what Ricoeur does not emphasize about his own understanding of dialogue is that conversation also requires both participants to share some understanding, to experience a congruent cognitive event.194
Now, in regards to discourse, we may call those cognitive events congruent which, chosen from among all the possible understandings of a text, nonetheless remain similar to one another through fidelity to the same text. These congruent mental events which we commonly call understandings, need not be, and almost certainly will not be, identical. They need not even be very much the same as in the Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher; 195and they must involve a medium. But the congruence of thinking shared by author and auditor must be for
Ricoeur bounded and made possible by the text, just as it is for Ricoeurian narrative – hence
Ricoeur’s long wrangling in The Rule of Metaphor with structuralism.196
More, a metaphor, as a text, contains its own logic and bounds of possibility and plausibility; the fact that there are both more and less valid interpretations of a text, though there
trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 167. 194 Although Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor does present us with a congruent cognitive experience in his understanding of how metaphor works through novelty and surprise for rhetor and auditor alike, his argument against the pursuit of authorial intention leads him to argue, laudably, for the diversity of meanings and their possible unfoldings when he comes to metaphor’s polysemy, rather than any commonality they might possess. And when he does consider common ground, his journey through structuralism leads him through the encounter with the text rather than the more oral experience of Aristotelian metaphor with which he began, and which would imply a more immediate encounter with another person. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 101–33. 195 As Schleiermacher writes: “Discourse is the mediation of sharable thought.... The unity of hermeneutics and rhetoric results from the fact that every act of understanding is the obverse of an act of discourse, in that one must come to grasp the thought which was at the base of a discourse.” Fr. D.E Schleiermacher, Jan Wojcik, and Roland Hass, “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” New Literary History 10, no. 1 (1978): 2, https://doi.org/10.2307/468302. A Ricoeurian update to this might say that discourse is the mediating of a shared thought, and that in discourse one must grasp the thoughts which are produced by that discourse. 196 Ricoeur’s interchange with structuralism and its notable figures, including deSausure, consume nearly all of Chapter 4-6, approximately half of the work. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 65–207.
105 are no perfect ones, implies that there will be both more and less valid understandings of a metaphor, though no perfect ones.197 At a bare minimum, perhaps, the author and auditor of a metaphor must both understand what they have just experienced to have been a metaphor, or else the distinctive processes that identify a Ricoerian metaphor – surprise, the realization that the literal meaning cannot be the case, the mental sorting through of possible meanings until finding one that seems plausible – simply cannot occur.
Similarly, just as both participants must understand a metaphor to have been a metaphor for a metaphor to work, so too must the participants of a conversation share some understanding of what occurred between them if the conversation is going to properly be considered a conversation at all. We can see how this works for Ricoeur when he writes of explanation and understanding: to understand something is to be able to explain it.198 The processes of explanation and understanding are congruent, shaped by the subject of the discourse, as well as by the nature of the conversation itself. Ricoeurian discourse makes little sense without a primordial alterity. I cannot explain something to myself – at least, I cannot without treating myself as though I were another in the first place, which of course, only proves the point.
We can be sure of the necessity of a plurality in conversation because there are two possibilities that we actually consider to be quite different. When we speak to ourselves as though we were a hypothetical other, we consider it “speaking out loud” or an internal monologue, and not at all extraordinary. But when I speak to myself as though I myself were a
197 As Ricoeur emphasizes: “In conclusion, if it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal and may be assimilated to so-called rules of thumb. The text is a limited field of possible constructions. The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism. It is always possible to argue for and against an interpretation.... and to seek for an agreement, even if that agreement remains beyond our reach.” Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” 160. 198 As he writes: “There is no explanation that does not reach its completion in understanding.” Paul Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hernemeutics II (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 130.
106 completely different and non-hypothetical person, we consider this self-alienated, and perhaps narcissistic, and perhaps schizophrenic, and in any case certainly not normal. When Ricoeur eventually takes up the issue of narrativity in Oneself as Another, he is presumably presenting the stories we tell about ourselves within the ranks of the first of these two possibilities, and not encouraging us to either neurosis or a retread of Cartesian solipsism.
Perceiving the continuity for Ricoeur between metaphor and discourse via alterity allows us to proceed “up the ladder” so to speak, and see in the third step of this chapter’s argument how primordial alterity functions in language in its broadest sense as well as in the development of the self. Alterity’s importance at this level is registered in Ricoeur’s concepts of attestation and address. Ricoeur understands attestation as both the assurance one has of one’s own identity across time and one’s sense that one participates in the witnessing of history. History could not properly be called history were it solely witnessed by and for one person. Implicitly, history in its reporting and its propagation requires an audience; it develops as a conversation. Ricoeurian attestation is so committed to an implicit primordial alterity that historians owe a debt to the dead. That is to say, the historical witness of attestation so strongly implies alterity that its speakers find others to hear them from beyond the grave, transcending space and time! One cannot witness alone, not if that witness implies testimony or the ability to testify, as it seems to do for Ricoeur.
Thus, even when language does not directly address a person, as in conversation, primordial alterity inflects language at all Ricoeurian levels: metaphorical, discursive, and attesting. This matters, ultimately, for both the shape of our understanding and for what we understand. If language implies primordial alterity and if truth is rendered in and by language – if it has linguisticality – then truth itself might imply alterity in this primordial sense. We might
107 understand not only for ourselves but also for others. We might understand in order to explain; indeed that seems one salient test of understanding. To put it another way: Ricoeur is right to say that self-understanding is impossible without alterity. But he stops short of asking whether, in this, self-understanding is a sort of special case, or if self-understanding’s quality of reliance on others might be in fact indicative of the nature of understanding generally.
Given that alterity inflects a Ricoeurian understanding of language at every level, in ways that speech like metaphor makes particularly clear, we are sent to the fourth part of this chapter’s argument, the idea that alterity inflects the foundations of the self in consciousness through language and its prerequisites. This idea does depart somewhat from the self at which Ricoeur ultimately arrives in his hermeneutic arc. The Ricoeurian self is, to a considerable extent, always already developed. As he writes:
the self is implied reflexively in the operations, the analysis of which precedes the return toward the self.... [I]n a sense, one could say that these studies have as their thematic unity human action and that the notion of action acquires, over the course of the studies, an ever-increasing extension and concreteness.... We impose on acting the following three-step rhythm: describing, narrating, prescribing.... This ordering, however, serves only a didactic function, intending to guide the reader through the polysemy of action. Depending on the question asked, this threesome can be read in a different order.... We shall ask principally whether the great polysemy of the term “being,” according to Aristotle, can permit us to give new value to the meaning of being as act and potentiality.199
Now Ricoeur does not seem to be certain that he does successfully link the actions of the self to any kind of ontology – but if he does so it is through the acts of describing, narrating, and prescribing, that he carries through from Time and Narrative. What we would note is that describing, narrating, and prescribing are the activities of, if not an adult, then probably of a
199 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 18–20.
108 fluent and certainly of a speaking child capable of a certain measure of rational thinking. They are manifestly not the activities of an infant or young, nursing child. They also seem to be relatively equal activities in terms of mental complexity, which does not seem to match the intelligence of early childhood, which both emerges gradually and erupts in increasingly complex bursts. While Ricoeur does not posit a self as a still Cartesian point, he does list as crucial a set of the self’s defining activities that are both relatively stable and always already developed, and does not provide an account of the origins of our actions.
Yet we know from the case of language that humans develop at least some key capacities over time, and that this development relies on the provision of others. Research indicates, for example, that the development of metaphor in children coincides with their developing a theory of the mind – that is, the sense that there are other mental perspectives beyond their own.200 Such correlation, of course, does not prove causation,201 but the correlation between metaphor and the development of a theory of mind does lead us to ask how the primordial alterity implicit in
Ricoeurian metaphor entirely suits a broader paradigm of how language itself develops – in the mouths of others. That is, we learn a language by first being spoken to. Once we have considered how language in the mouths of others impacts the formation of the person, our rapprochement between Ricoeur and Levinas on the self’s original relation to alterity should be nearly complete.
200 Stephanie Caillies, “Nondecomposible Understanding in Children: Recursive Theory of Mind and Working Memory,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 67, no. 2 (2012): 108–9. 201 In concluding their paper on creativity and emotional regulation, Hoffman and Russs emphasize that their findings only speak to correlation, and never to causation. Isolating any one factor in studies of child development has a high complexity threshold, as so many children’s abilities develop simultaneously. Jessica Hoffman and Sandra Russ, “Pretend Play, Creativity and Emotional Regulation in Children,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6, no. 2 (2012): 183.
109 3.2. Developmental psychology affirms that the self’s origins rely not on reflectivity, but on shared cognitive experience – a pattern that extends into maturity through language
We will begin this chapter on attestation proper by noting a most fundamental point: that
Levinas does not agree with Ricoeur that the self equals reflective consciousness. We will then note that this disagreement matters because developmental psychology shows that Levinas is generally correct and that the self instead emerges, even at a biological level, from relationship to others.202 The relational origin of the self will sound familiar to those who notice how metaphor works in Ricoeur’s understanding, because, for Ricoeur, metaphor demands relationship to others. Indeed, we find that, in Ricoeur, both the speaker and hearer of a metaphor must share a common cognitive event for a metaphor to work. This dialogue-event structure is extraordinarily important, because it also happens to be the structure for language as a whole, which exists so that we may share attention. That is, there is little point to having language if we cannot direct others to the same events, dangers, and allies that concern us. So, in the first part of this chapter, we hope to show that, with the structure of metaphor as dialogue-event, Ricoeur establishes an excellent paradigm for understanding language more broadly.
Unfortunately, the excellent paradigm, discourse, that Ricoeur establishes for understanding language through metaphor seems somewhat at odds with the paradigm from which he develops his understanding of subjectivity: the same reflective self-consciousness which the French philosophical tradition has long assumed to be so very fundamental to the self.
His career evinces this tension. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical project begins with the philosophy of self-consciousness and remains consistent with it, rather than with, for example, linguistics or
202 Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, 56.
110 social anthropology.203 He may have departed from Husserl over the self-transparency of the self, but not over whether or not the foundation of the self lies in some form of self-awareness.204
Thus Ricoeur does not begin with metaphor, or even with the self proper, but rather with the reflective consciousness that the French philosophical tradition has assumed to be fundamental to the self. It may be worthwhile to state exactly what this reflective consciousness is, and thus how squarely the French Cartesian tradition follows it, and thus better understand what Ricoeur wishes to take from it and what Levinas wishes to abandon wholesale. Here is how
Jerrold Seigel describes the issue at stake here: “Reflectivity…derives from the human capacity to make both the world and our own existence objects of our active regard, to turn a kind of mirror not only on phenomena in the world, including our bodies and our social relations, but on our consciousness, too, putting ourselves at a distance from our own being so as to examine, judge and sometimes regulate or revise it.”205 Compare this with how Levinas describes subjectivity in the West: “The conception of the subjectivity of the subject held by the Western tradition assumes that the manifestation of all being is the starting point of all sense.... The importance that the concept of intentionality has taken on in recent times marks the culmination of this trend.”206
203 “His academic training was in the tradition of French reflexive philosophy, a tradition that seeks to understand how the “I” comes to be aware of itself and of its thought and action starting from the lived experience of reflexive consciousness, our being aware of ourselves as existing, thinking, and acting. This focus on reflexive consciousness always played a role in organizing Ricoeur’s thinking.” Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 204 “Ricoeur seems to unite in his work the phenomenological method of eidetic reduction elaborated by Husserl on the one hand, and the existential emphasis on human finitude through incarnate existence or personal body, on the other,” Stuart C. Hackett, “Philosophical Objectivity and Existential Involvement in the Methodology of Paul Ricoeur,” International Philosophical Quarterly 9.1, no. 1 (1969): 14. 205 Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6. 206 Levinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony,” 263.
111 Ricoeur’s insight that reflective consciousness requires alterity is indeed salutary, telling us that even reflective self-awareness requires the inclusion of others. Yet while his conception of a self that describes, narrates, and prescribes the events of a life in time might be said to add sophistication and depth to a tradition of reflective self-consciousness, it can hardly be said to abandon it – nor, perhaps, to overcome its most fundamental assumptions. For if the self is not identical with reflective consciousness to begin with, then Ricoeur’s insight about alterity’s place in reflective consciousness tells us less about the self than it might seem. And Levinas would perhaps be the first in line to say that reflective consciousness, while it might be attributable to the self, is not the first thing to be said about the self. So if we are at all interested in learning from Levinas, we must expand our study to those foundations of the self that lie, perhaps, outside of reflective self-consciousness.
This white space in Ricoeur’s thinking about the self is akin to the white space in his thinking about metaphor and the capacity that makes it possible. We can now begin to fill in some of this white space. We can make explicit what is implicit in the structure of Ricoeur’s thinking: as a deliberate category mistake, metaphor requires alterity. A fair way of stating the
Ricoeurian thesis on metaphor is that it is a lie that does not intend to deceive. Rather than using denotative language, the speaker of a metaphor uses figurative language in such a way that its literal meaning cannot be taken as the case. Taken, we may ask, by whom? Ricoeurian metaphor, beginning as it does in Aristotelian rhetoric, cannot escape its assumption of an audience. When he imagines rhetoric, Ricoeur does not envision the lonely poet sitting in her garret. Instead, in the Aristotelian tradition, he imagines the life of the marketplace, the Athenian senate, the public.
112 Indeed, its public function is at the heart of the rule of metaphor that Ricoeur imagines, the power he wishes to reclaim for it.207
We can use metaphor’s fundamental structure to construct a viable paradigm for understanding the self as Levinas has lead us to understand it. Structurally, Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor does incorporate alterity at a fundamental level. As an element of rhetoric, without the implied presence of a hearer, metaphor simply does not work. If a metaphor is taken literally by its audience, it degenerates into absurdity. It is still-born. Conversely, if an audience takes denotative language metaphorically, that fails in obscurity. Whether or not rhetor and audience agree on the precise meaning of a metaphor truly might not matter. But, as we have said, it certainly matters whether or not they agree it to have been a metaphor. The genius of Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor rests in taking it not as an object, as another entry in a list of supposedly superfluous figures of speech, but as an event or experience that transforms understanding through re-imagination.208
The event-nature of metaphor comes about as both author and auditor must have the same cognitive experience for a metaphor to be born alive – not that the contents of that experience must align, but that the shape of the experience must be shared. One has the experience of crafting a metaphor by perceiving connections that were not obvious and by rendering that connection in vivid linguistic form. But the riddle of the metaphor means that one’s auditor has to go through a similar mental journey of sorting through a metaphor’s plausible and implausible meanings to arrive at its most likely ones.
207 “Speech was a weapon called upon to gain victory in battles where the decision hung on the unspoken word. Before becoming futile, rhetoric was dangerous.” Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 11. 208 Imagination as a whole, but particularly as production, is a perhaps overlooked theme within the Ricoeurian corpus. As Mark Muldoon writes “Every interpretive process for Ricoeur has a creative function where imagination plays a role.” Muldoon, “Reading, Imagination and Interpretation.”
113 The genesis of metaphor as a shared cognitive experience may grant us the keys to understanding the origins of language as a whole. The Ricoeurian structure of metaphor as a shared cognitive experience is quietly revolutionary. Its implications are significant and expansive. Other theories of metaphor say that it may come from embodied human experience.209 Alternatively, metaphor might come as our minds map out intellectual terrain that is only half- known or understood.210 Still other theories attribute metaphor’s origin to repressed instinctual drives or from using words in varying semantic fields.211 But we offer instead the linguist Michael Tomasello, who notes: “The fundamental point that emerges from the ontogenesis of language is that it can only be imparted from within relations of shared emotional bonding, what we might call ‘communion’. Language cannot be generated from within….The young child grasps a word that is proffered to her from the parent. She has to catch on and follow the communicative intent of the adult.”212
The experience of learning a word is like the experience of understanding a metaphor, insofar as in either case one must in some sense experience the same cognitive event as another mind does. As with metaphor, one must determine and then adopt in some measure another’s perspective. This seems to be a fundamental linguistic moment. In the case of a word, it is true of individuals. In the case of a language, it may be true of the human species. As Taylor also notes:
Tomasello…makes this ability to grasp the communicative intentions of others the crucial new capacity which allows human children, and not animals, even advanced primates, to become language users. Chimps, he argues, and other higher mammals, can identify their conspecific’s ordinary intentions; can see that this one is seeking food, the
209 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. 210 Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Gloucester: Claredon Press, 1987). 211 For the former, see Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva. For the latter, see Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language. 212 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 100–102.
114 other is preparing to attack; but only humans can see that another wants to communicate something.213
We shall return to Tomasello’s work itself shortly. For now, we should note that through the experience of shared intent, the genesis of language seems to be like the genesis of metaphor – both individually on the plane of language acquisition (both require us to read the intent of particular others, specifically in the case of metaphor to see that its words should not be taken literally), and corporately in the field of language generation (both generally require us, as a species, to be aware of other minds, specifically in the case of metaphor to understand when these words should not be taken literally).
The developmental parallels between the acquisition of language and the capacity to employ metaphor should not surprise us, as understanding metaphor is part of learning language anyway. The capacity for metaphor is part of linguistic fluency – learning any language, clearly, involves learning its varying metaphors, idioms, and other unique constructions. The capacity to be fluent in a language comes concurrently with the development of an awareness of mind, just as the capacity for metaphor does. It all seems to be part and parcel of the same developmental threshold.214 Our ability to understand others as others welcomes us into the full linguistic world.
Though he does not apply the concept to childhood specifically, nor to linguistic anthropology, Donald Davidson does trace, within philosophy, the interrelatedness of language and theory of mind to their entwined epistemic origins. His work thus merits mention here. Now, a full summary of his position is beyond our scope, but suffice it to say that he notes the difference between and interdependence of the three ways in which knowledge seems to come to us: we largely know our own minds without investigation or evidence; yet it is through the
213 Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, 55. 214 Caillies, “Nondecomposible Understanding in Children,” 113.
115 investigation of our senses that we come to know the external world; and yet again, our knowledge of the contents of other minds is susceptible to neither immediate awareness nor sensory investigation alone.215 The trouble for Davidson, of course, is that “none of the three forms of knowledge is reducible to one or both of the others.”216 None is primary, and none can be understood in isolation, as we can see in the persistence of the mind-body problem and the problem of other minds, which have resisted reductive approaches.
Further intersection of the kinds of knowing comes when we consider that the correspondence of our own thoughts to states of affairs can only come through triangulation with another mind; indeed, until our beliefs can be correlated with states of affairs through the corroboration of others, they can scarcely be said to have any kind of actual propositional content at all.217 Knowing our own mental states directly (or non-inferentially), and those of others indirectly (inferentially), leaves us with no real reason to assume that they are anything alike: a serious dilemma.218 This forces us to investigate how we in fact come to know the minds of others. Since a most significant aspect of a mind is the belief it holds, and belief entails having a concept of truth, Davidson follows the Wittgensteinian line that communication – that is, language – allows us to form thoughts, including thoughts about truth, and to correlate what others say with states of affairs in the world.219 As Davidson summarizes his argument:
Knowledge of the propositional content of our own minds is not possible without the other forms of knowledge since without communication propositional thought is
215 Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153. It seems worthwhile to note that these three means of knowledge correspond fairly neatly with Jerrold Siegel’s three models or versions of the Western self, which we noted in our introduction: reflective, bodily, and social. It also implies that emphasizing any one of these characteristics of the self is applying one means of knowledge to the self alone, which Davidson and Siegel would seem to agree to be a mistake, and the source of seemingly intractable problems. 216 Davidson, 154. 217 Davidson, 160. 218 Davidson, 155. 219 Davidson, 154–56.
116 impossible. It is also the case that we are not in a position to attribute thoughts to others unless we have our own thoughts, and know what they are, for the attribution of thoughts to others is a matter of matching the verbal and other behavior of others to our own propositions or meaningful sentences. Knowledge of our own minds and of the minds of others are mutually dependent.220
Here Davidson reiterates the Ricoeurian idea that we require other minds to know our own. That we also and at the same time require knowledge of the world to know other minds, even as we must know other minds through language to know the world, means that Davidson position implies that we require others to have minds at all; more significantly, he would certainly agree that we require them to have knowledge – not only of ourselves, but of anything. As he writes:
“A community of minds is the basis of knowledge; it provides the measure of all things.”221 And as he later emphasizes: “The thoughts we form and entertain are located conceptually in the world we inhabit, with others.”222
It matters that others welcome us, through language, into a world of others – and that, without that welcome, we would not be ourselves. So while Davidson does not make the same point about linguistic or psychological development that we do – indeed, he almost immediately brackets off inquiry into the origins of language either anthropologically or individually as beyond the realms of proper philosophical investigation223 – he does come to the same sense of a shared ontological and epistemological world that our investigations of development have led us to understand. Davidson’s recognition of alterity matters because it affects that world and the mind that encounters it. Davidson names his article “Three Kinds of Knowledge” but he might have just as easily called it “Four Kinds of Mind” because any mind which would be
(impossibly) formed by only reflective, sensory, or interpersonal knowledge would be quite
220 Davidson, 160. 221 Davidson, 164. 222 Davidson, 165. 223 Davidson, 157.
117 different from the minds of integrative knowledge that we actually have. More, we have had good reason not to follow Davdison’s proscription of philosophical investigation of languages’ origins: developmental science has advanced to the point where it can speak to the development of the brain, and the brain has been a subject of proper philosophical investigation, because of its relation to the mind.224
Sharing minds matters, too. The presence and influence of others does not occur in a rote or mechanistic fashion. As Tomasello notes concerning shared attention, it is not that language functions in a purely operative way – if a mother only wants a child to sit down, for example, she could just as easily walk over and push the child into a chair.225 Rather, what we communicate in language is that the mother wants the child to decide to sit down, to come to the same decision she has that now is the time for sitting.226 Tomasello writes: “the understanding of a communicative intention is therefore a special case of the understanding of an intention; it is the understanding of another person’s intention toward my intentional states. Understanding this is clearly more complex than understanding another person’s intention simpliciter.227 We would suggest that this special linguistic case of sharing intentional states has its own special or heightened case: metaphor. After all, can we imagine an element of speech that more demands shared attention in the intent to understand? Drawing upon shared attention might be said to be metaphor’s greatest task in Ricoeur’s understanding: “Can you see this way, too?” the metaphor asks.
224 Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 225 Tomasello, Constructing a Language, 23. 226 Tomasello, 23. 227 Tomasello, 23.
118 So we may thank Ricoeur both for providing the structure of alterity in metaphor and for positing the metaphoricity of language itself. While not all language may be derivable from metaphor in the strict sense that Ricoeur seems to imply in The Rule of Metaphor, such metaphoricity does emphasize the broader ubiquity of metaphor in our linguistic experience. For it is as difficult to imagine a language which makes no use of metaphor as it is difficult to imagine a humanity that makes no use of language. We would only wish to make Ricoeur’s structure explicit, and carry it forward, developing it into an understanding of the self and of alterity which he himself does not completely realize.
Ricoeur has begun our task of detailing how alterity functions in the genesis of metaphor by providing a broader structure of two persons sharing a cognitive experience, and their respective experiences constituting a common event. This is the structural material we need to make the genesis of metaphor in alterity more explicit. (What his broad structure does not do is detail whether or not specific hearers matter, whether it matters that other persons differ from each other as well as from the self.) What we can now do is walk this structure forward and see how alterity functions within broader categories of language itself. For we do not wish to carry the structure of dialogue forward without making its qualities explicit. For if language as Ricoeur understands it has the quality of metaphoricity, of having come through and by metaphor, then it certainly follows that it should retain some or many of metaphor’s qualities, primordial alterity being chief among them. And if language as a whole retains primordial alterity as its condition of possibility, then narrative and discourse certainly should, too.
119 3.3. Though metaphor exemplifies Ricoeurian discourse, Ricoeur abandons the language of polysemic vitality when he turns to narrative, impoverishing it of qualities such as address
We may recall now, from our first chapter, that metaphor requires alterity both phenomenologically, as an artifact of speech, and developmentally, as a capacity that requires awareness of, and imitation of, other minds. In our last section, we added the notion that metaphor requires alterity because it is Ricoeurian discourse. Ricoeur understands discourse to be fundamentally conversational in nature. Indeed, conversationality might be said to mark discourse as living language (presuming Ricoeur would grant that extension of vitality, a term whose use he later discontinued) because conversation grants discourse a measure of polysemy and irreducibility; whatever the meanings of a discourse, it may be understood partly in the experience of having had that discourse. Not only are conversations irreducible, they are also notoriously un-repeatable.
In Ricoeurian terms, we will say that discourse is an attributable event; both the speaker and the hearer engage individually in discourse, exchanging roles, with the result being that they both collectively generate a conversation. Moreover, the attributability of discourse as an event grants discourse the quality of address, as it not only happens between people but is also intended for others in content-defining ways. Most significantly for our ultimate purposes, the fact that the others involved are not interchangeable means that the nature of the address in discourse ties it ultimately and intimately to questions of identity.
Now we have seen from our first chapter that the very existence of a Ricoeurian metaphor demands that both a speaker and a hearer, an author and an audience, understand a plausible connection between its terms. Given this structural condition, it perhaps should not surprise us that the capacity to make metaphor also depends on the presence and influence of others. Though Ricoeur does not say so, both situations are contiguous within his larger,
120 language-inflected world that is itself congenial to alterity and the liveliness of others. What we wish to do next is suggest that both the genius capacity to make metaphor and our metaphors themselves may both be folded into one larger phenomenological reality: the realm of discourse.
After all, metaphors do not live alone, islands unto themselves. Metaphors belong, surely, to that subset of language in which someone says something to someone about something.228
Ricourian metaphors abide in larger contexts: narratives, and, most broadly speaking, discourse.
Discourse is not for ourselves alone – at least, it is not only a solitary pleasure. It is a conversation. According to Ricoeur’s rhetorical bent, dialogue, not monologue, rings loudest in the body of his work. The Aristotelian image of the marketplace, with its interplay of vendors and customers, suggests the social import of Ricoeur’s observations. So does, of course, the trajectory of his work from phenomenology to psychology to hermeneutics to social action.
Ultimately, for Ricoeur, it really is the case that no one is an island.
We ought to emphasize, at this point, a note that Ricoeur develops, not about language at all, but about the self: the undeniably attributive quality of our actions. My actions, Ricoeur notes, are those that can be attributed to me, in a sort of Kantian grammar of events; there’s scarcely any other sensible way to talk about them, just as there’s little way to understand reality without notions of space, time, and cause and effect. 229 Now of course speaking and listening are both acts and experiences attributable to specific agents. Once I have said something, I cannot be mistaken about who said it. Nor, having heard something, can I be mistaken about who heard it.
228 Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 229 “The question ‘Who did this?’ can be answered by mentioning a proper name, by using a demonstrative pronoun (he, she, this one, that one) or by giving a definite description. These replies render something in general a someone.” Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 59.
121 What the structure of the dialogue-event suggests, therefore, is that what is said is something that is experienced, albeit possibly in unique ways, by both of us. When two people speak we say they share a conversation. The individual experience attributable to each of us, framed differently, is also attributable to both of us. The experiential structure of metaphor we discussed earlier is only one narrow application of the dialogue-event. But the dialogue-event can be applied more broadly, naturally, into conversation.
The structure of attribution in conversation also carries over into the Ricoeurian themes of explanation, interpretation, and understanding. Consider the argument he makes toward the end of his essay “Explanation and Understanding”:
Strictly speaking, explanation alone is methodical. Understanding is instead the nonmethodical moment that, in the sciences of interpretation, combines with the methodical moment of explanation. This moment precedes, accompanies, concludes, and thus envelops explanation. Explanation, in turn, develops understanding analytically. This dialectical tie between explanation and understanding results in a very complex and paradocical relation between the human sciences and the natural sciences. 230
Thus Ricoeur presents a unifying dialectic about how knowledge is obtained: to deny the moment of explanation is to deny the moment of understanding, and vice versa; moreover, each explanation enhances the understanding we procure, and so on – even if understanding must have primordiality. Yet also present here by implication, if not by emphasis, is a similar dialectic about how knowledge is shared, given that truth is discursive.231 That is, when I reliably interpret something that you have explained, we may be said to share an understanding, but this is not so if we deny any of the terms. Put another way, using the ordinary understanding of these terms, the details of my interpretation might differ from the details of your explanation, but if we do
230 Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding,” 142–43. 231 Clearly, while Ricoeur also attaches the parallels between the natural sciences and “explanation” and the human sciences and “understanding” for reasons of his conversation with Gadamer, we are not so quick to move beyond the ordinary understanding of these terms. Not only are we not sufficiently versed to manage such an excursus, the move itself may call attention away from what the ordinary meanings of these terms can otherwise teach us.
122 not, in the end, share any understanding whatsoever, it seems strange to say that either explanation or interpretation has actually occurred. Just as metaphors could be still-born, so too can conversations. Whether, in a conversation, I may be attributed my explanation or my interpretation (depending on my role), some level of understanding must be attributable to us; it must be ours.
But if I intend my explanation to become our understanding, then I must shape my explanation, my oration, to suit what I believe your understanding to be. This brings us to the broadest feature of language we have so far introduced: address. Presumably, if all discourse is someone speaking to someone else about something, then it follows that any explanation would be given for the sake of another’s interpretation even as it is said. Address shapes a conversation in content-defining ways, from the very onset of discourse. After all, I wouldn’t speak if I did not mean for understanding to occur. Intent matters in the selection of words as much as it does in their presentation.232
Implicit in discourse is the promise that I will speak as clearly and expressively as possible, in order to develop our shared understanding. The address of discourse implies its tailoring for a specific audience – even as, of course, my choice of words, tone, and pacing will reflect upon me. Not only is discourse as an experience generally attributable to each of its participants, as well as to both of them, its specific contents are shaped by their specific identities so that they may share words that are, in some ways, unique to them and their occasion. We can readily see this intentional shaping in the prevalence of dialect, register, mood, and other
232 In particular, intent in Aristotle informs the transformation of genre: “As soon, however, as Tragedy and Comedy appeared in the field, those naturally drawn to the one line of poetry became writers of comedies instead of iambs, and those naturally drawn to the other, writers of tragedies instead of epics, because those modes or art were grander and of more esteem than the old.” Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. Ingram Bywater. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 1449a.
123 linguistic markers of identity in time.233 We tailor our words to suit those we are speaking to, and to the occasion of our speech. And we do so because when we do not, our explanations falter, our metaphors fall flat, and shared understanding slips away.
The suitability of metaphor to moment and audience perhaps addresses a minor white space in Ricoeur’s thinking: the life or death of metaphor does not necessarily describe the quality of that metaphor. Our pet example of rain “glistening like nose hair after a sneeze” lives in the sense that its simile cannot be literally correct, but fails in the sense that tact discourages our associating beauty with biological functions. Metaphors must break the rules of logic, but must also abide by other rules of association and tone. “She was a couch potato in the gravy boat of life,” another example, cannot be true on a literal level, of course, but fails because the humorous image it provokes undercuts the implied accusation; a reader of Ricoeur might say that its sense and reference are not only not the same, but also pulling in opposite directions. Skilled crafters of metaphor, like skilled participants in discourse, suit their words to the minds of the audience that will hear them. If living metaphors are those that have polysemy, then healthy metaphors are those that have both polysemy and suitability. They are addressed.
It stands to reason that healthy discourse retains metaphor’s concept of address.
Augustine, no stranger to rhetoric, notes this when he recalls Cicero’s admonition that oratory should “teach, delight, and move,” and also when he enjoins his readers to present the truth in
233 One researcher notes the following of code-switching, the dialogical switching between different types of language: “In the Arab world switching between Arabic and a foreign language has been called by one Arab writer, according to Suleiman (2004:227), ‘linguistic prostitution’. It can also be considered a form of ‘colonial penetration’.” Reem Bassiourney, Arabic Sociolinguistics (Edinburgh: Edinbugh University Press, 2009). Another writes of sportscasting: “A…distinctive cue is the prosodic pattern, i.e., the features of tempo, rhythm, loudness, intonation and other characteristics of voice. This cue is so powerful that it can distinguish not only sports announcing from other radio talk but even baseball from football announcing when the segmental phonetic characteristics and hence, the actual words of the broadcast are muffled or masked.” Charles A. Ferguson, “Sports Announcer Talk: Syntactic Aspects of Register Variation,” Language in Society 12, no. 2 (June 1983): 153.
124 clear eloquence because too few will regard the truth unless it is also pleasurable to hear.234
Aristotle might be said to lean still harder on the concept of address when he says that the audience “determines the speech’s end and object.”235 That is, the audience “decides” what kind of oratory is going to happen: as an audience, politicians will expect to hear about the future, judges to become informed about the past, and casual observers will note the rhetor’s skill at evoking present feeling. So, orators will give political, forensic, or ceremonial speeches to them respectively. The address of discourse determines at least some of the contents of that discourse, and certainly a healthy measure of its presentation. Ricouer is no stranger to this subject, as evident in the following claim: “And yet the initial notion of persuasion is not abolished; it is merely set aright. In particular, the orientation of argument to a listener – evidence that all discourse is addressed to someone – and its adherence to contents defined by the topics, keep
‘the persuasive as such’ from turning into a logic of probability. Thus, rhetoric will remain at most the antistrophos (‘counterpart’) of dialectic, but will not dissolve into it.”236
The concept of address allows us, at last, to incorporate a more significant quality of alterity into our understanding of discourse, one that Ricoeur might have specified, and that
Levinas in fact did: primordial alterity as the non-communicable.237 Each other is particular, different from every other other. The general structure which requires primordial alterity need not – and should not – presume that the specific contents of alterity are substitutable. In
Levinasian terms, alterity is always non-totalizable.238 While both my mother and my brother are other, they do not equal one another, and they are not reducible to a common theme. Though I
234 Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine” (Eulogos, 2007), http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG0137/_INDEX.HTM. 235 Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” 1538b. 236 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 34. 237 “An individual is other to the other. One is not the other. Each is other to each. Each excludes all others.” Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, 188. 238 Levinas, 31.
125 can describe and compare them in many different ways, I cannot fully encompass them by any term. Each other is individual, unique, and irreducible without remainder. No two persons are identical.
Ricoeur’s logic of attribution leads to a structure of address in discourse: both its contents and its presentation are framed by particular speakers for particular hearers, and no hearers or speakers are interchangeable; each discourse is a unique event. We may take away several things from this Ricoeurian understanding. First, discourse continues the structure of metaphor, requiring both speaker and hearer to experience the same cognitive event of reappraisal, and translates it into a similar cognitive event of shared understanding. This is the dialogue-event.
Second, because discourse is dialogical in nature, discourse is attributable to each of its participants and also to both of them. Beneath the defining structure of discourse as someone saying something to someone about something is, though unidentified, an identifying structure of attribution in which each “someone” is unique. Every discourse is spoken, heard, and understood by specific persons. All of these traits converge, or ought to converge, where Ricoeurian discourse and the Ricoeurian self converge: in attestation.
3.4. Without vitality, Time and Narrative narrows the scope of possibilities that attestation can embrace We will enter the heart of this chapter by noting that, despite maintaining the same dialogue-event structure for all discourse, Ricoeur largely abandons the language of vitality and polysemy so intrinsic to metaphor when he discusses other examples of discourse, such as narrative. This absence is also apparent when we enter his discussions of attestation. For
Ricoeur, attestation consists of both one’s assurance of one’s own identity and the way that identity works out in the unfolding of a history among others – as evinced in testimony. But with
126 our understanding of the dialogue-event structure of Ricoeurian discourse, we will clarify
Ricoeur’s assertion that testimony is also testimony “to” another person. Like all forms of discourse, testimony bears the burden of address. This is nowhere more apparent than when
Ricoeur considers the historian’s obligation to the dead. The inexhaustible testimony of the dead, through the faculty of imagination, makes even their discourse living and conversational as a dialogue-event. Ricoeur implies this because we owe a debt of veracity to the dead rather than to the events and places of the past.239
Because attestation is addressed, we will consider reversing the order of Ricoeur’s two senses of attestation: that is, it may be our witness in the presence of others that conditions our assurance of ourselves, rather than the reverse. Ricoeur has made this reversal possible, we argue, because he has advanced the dialogue-event into attestation itself, through attribution. To make developmental sense of this, we might recall from the last chapter our sense of testimony that is non-verbal and which precedes the genesis of the self in narrative. And we might recall, more specifically, our case of “allusive attestation” from the second chapter, in which we resound throughout our own development with the influence of those who have cared for us; their sensibility becomes our own, before we improvise upon it. If we can join “allusive attestation” to Ricoeurian attestation as he offers it, we will have allowed a fuller understanding of that self.
239 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 177–84. The debt to the dead and the debt of the fictional author correspond inasmuch as the author of either is indebted to a worldview: for the author, it is his own, for the historian it is to the world as the dead experienced it. Presumably, the worldview matters to a narrative in either case because it was held by some person, and not simply because it referred to some state of affairs. It would seem self-contradictory for history to report a view from nowhere, if Ricoeur follows the Gadamerian line that to vacate the humanity involved is to defeat the purpose of humanities and become less human.
127 It is notable, for our purposes, that the language of liveliness and polysemy, so signal to
Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor, vanishes from further discussions almost entirely, an absence particularly notable in his understanding of the self and of political action. To begin, recall that the trajectory of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical detour bends toward his anthropology developed in Oneself as Another.240 And we can follow a simplified version of this journey ourselves: symbolism’s reversion to language leads us to metaphor, whose rhetorical extension leads to narrative discourse, which progresses fairly naturally into questions of identity. While the continuity in Ricoeur’s career is significant, we have also seen that there are discontinuities or breaks within this same arc about which Ricoeur remains relatively silent.
The vanishing of vitality as a Ricoeurian theme merits a detour of its own. Though one should neither argue from, nor assign too much importance to, an absence, a number of
Ricoeur’s manuscripts are freely available online and easily searchable. So, it is not difficult to determine that the following of his writings are entirely without any use of the words “vitality,”
“liveliness” or “alive”: Essays on Biblical Interpretation; Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences; and Critique and Conviction.241 Further, neither the above language nor The Rule of
Metaphor itself are so mentioned in the notes or indices of: Figuring the Sacred; Memory,
History, Forgetting; From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II; Oneself as Another; What
Makes us Think?; History and Truth; or The Just.242 Perhaps most tellingly, vitality seems to
240 “At the end of his three-volume study of narrative (Time and Narrative, 1984–88) Ricoeur realized that what was said there pointed to the importance of the idea of a narrative identity.” Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 241 Paul Ricoeur, Essays On Biblical Interpretation, Religion Online (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1980), http://www.religion-online.org/book/essays-on-biblical-interpretation/.; Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2016).; Paul Ricoeur, “Critique and Conviction” (Kyoto Prize.org, November 2000), http://www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates/paul_ricoeur/. 242 Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred.; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting.; Ricoeur, From Text to Action.; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.; Paul Ricoeur, The Just (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
128 accomplish its vanishing act almost entirely within the three volumes of Time and Narrative, which do still extensively discuss metaphor. The details of this disappearance are most revealing.
We may begin our side-exploration of these books with an observation: although Ricoeur describes vitality as a signifying feature of metaphor in the The Rule of Metphor, he does not extend the quality to narrative, but says instead that “with narrative, the semantic innovation lies in the intervening of another work of synthesis – a plot.”243 This comes even though, in Time and Narrative: Volume 1, Ricoeur begins by discussing the deep ties between metaphor and narrative, both of which produce semantic innovation, but of the two “Metaphor is alive as long as we can perceive, through the new semantic impertinence – and so to speak in its denseness – the resistance of the words in their ordinary use and therefore their incompatibility at the level of a literal interpretation of a sentence.”244 And yet this is almost the last mention Ricoeur makes of vitality. He also writes of metaphor in Time and Narrative: Volume 2: “The first trail is now open, and it leads us to look for others, those of the stylistic figures whose function it is precisely to posit the relation between two different objects, this figure is metaphor.”245 Again positing the relation is the most pertinent purpose of metaphor, but vitality is no longer mentioned. By the time we get to Time and Narrative: Volume 3, Ricoeur writes: “On prefiguring the past for history (metaphor) has an explicitly representative vocation…all the other tropes, even though they are distinct from each other, are variants of metaphor.... Their function is to correct the naiveté of metaphor.... It remains for irony to introduce a negative note.”246
243 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 1., ix. 244 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), ix. 245 Ricoeur, 148. 246 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 153.
129 So we have progressed from vitality, as a tensional concept through which metaphor supplies semantic innovation, to the need in history for irony to counter the naiveté of the comparisons that metaphor makes. As Ricoeur adds in the notes of the same volume: “metaphor is essentially representational, metonymy reductionist, synecdoche is integrative, and irony is negational.”247 This is a striking transformation. What has happened to the is-and-is not of metaphor, which supplied its own negation? To its vitalizing polysemy?
Thus we see Ricoeur become more concerned with the notion of representation and less concerned with the polysemy and vitality that metaphor provides. To be sure, Ricoeur himself is aware of the transition. As he writes in Critique and Conviction: “I was concerned by the problem posed by the capacity displayed by language to re-order the experience of the reader….This problem seemed to me to be mastered better in Time and Narrative than in Rule of
Metaphor.”248 This is true to the extent that by the end of Time and Narrative as a whole, metaphor becomes a semantic last resort: “either we name the constituting – the flux – after what is constituted or we rely on metaphors.”249 This is what he understands metaphor to do generally:
“Words are not always lacking…and when literal terms are missing metaphor serves as a relay station, bringing with it stores of semantic innovation.”250
Coinciding with this dwindling of the qualities of metaphorical discourse is a narrowing sense of what Ricoeurian narrative, particularly history, can responsibly accomplish. The narrowing continues even though Ricoeur’s broadest understanding of discourse implicitly maintains the same fundamental structure as his understanding of metaphor: the dialogue-event.
247 Ricoeur, 310. 248 Ricoeur, “Critique and Conviction,” 83. 249 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 41. The flux is, presumably, the change incumbent to becoming. 250 Ricoeur, 27.
130 The structure continues, but not all of its original implications are in evidence. Instead, we are presented with new implications that may or may not be entangled with the old, but which
Ricoeur does not present as related.
Ricoeur writes in Oneself as Another that attestation is fundamentally attestation of self.251 It is the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering. And it is this assurance that preserves the question of who, as in who did something, from being replaced with a what or why.
That is, attestation is what allows us to be linked to but distinguished from our actions as well as our reasons for our actions. Implicitly, we trust our own identities as agents in the world.
Attestation in this sense is an assurance and a trust. And, perhaps most importantly for Ricoeur, as a trust attestation in this sense can have no other foundation. That we will remain ourselves is simply an assumption, and a risk that we must take.
Thus the trust we place in ourselves is primordial, but also reinforced and affirmed. It is others who confirm to us through attribution that our actions and our words are indeed our own.
Now this would have been, it would seem, an excellent chance for Ricoeur, even in his own thinking about the self, to say how acting in the context of others and speaking to them gives vitality to our self-assurance by putting this assurance into a living world that opens us up for interpretation and grants our words and deeds potentially manifold meaning as well as singular attribution. But because, by this point in Ricoeur’s thinking, the language and logic of metaphor have fallen by the wayside, so too does such a possibility.
3.5. Ricoeur’s “debt to the dead” broaches the possibility that debts may be animating and productive, allowing the possibility that his own call to justice may be more than verbal
251 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 22.
131 Ricoeur’s understanding of attestation becomes more complex in the way attestation manifests in the world. The question of narrative identity, of telling one’s doing and being in the world, becomes the question of the ethical purpose of that identity. It is not enough to trust that I remain myself without understanding the context in which I do so. And for Ricoeur this context is, of course, other people. We attest among other attesting selves. This is attestation’s second sense of witnessing the unfolding course of history. And, most significantly for our purposes, we know we are selves among other selves because of testimony.252 Raw attestation, the sense that we remain ourselves, does not seem to require other people, but the purpose for which we do so manifestly does. When attestation speaks, it sounds like testimony. “Your honor, when I opened the door I saw him shoot that man.” Testimony declares that we are persons living among other persons.
Testimony establishes us as a person among other persons to whom one must also witness. That is the double meaning of witness as both seeing and speaking. Naturally, that we are people living among other people has implications – though Ricoeur does not include all of them in Oneself as Another. In Hermeneutics, he adds, “Testimony first requires interpretation through the dialectics of the witness and the things seen.... To be a witness is not to testify that but to testify to.”253 Now Ricoeur’s point here is that witness is not a form of knowledge through adequation; there is no foundational or propositional assurance that what one witnesses is the case. But in witness there is a presentation of one’s own narrative and knowledge of the case or events in question. When one witnesses, one either makes a report to someone or observes that which one will later report upon. Either sense of the word will do.
252 Sebastion Kauffman, “The Attestation of Self as a Bridge Between Hermeneutics and Ontology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur” (Milwaukee, WI, Marquette University, 2010), 10. https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=dissertations_mu. 253 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 148.
132 Both testimony and witness thus have profound implications for, and entanglement with,
Ricoeur’s effort to establish that the assurance of the continuity of self works itself out among others. Taken together they mean that attestation in Ricouer’s second sense may be always and already given to and for others. Public attestation is testimony, and bears its quality of address.
The self lives not only as itself but also for the benefit of others in just institutions, if we want to repeat Ricoeur’s famous phrase.254 As a means of discourse, testimony and witness come with attestation’s second sense. Thus, attestation bears, or ought to bear, that same structure of discourse which requires the presence of others and lends it the quality of address. We testify
“to” others in the implicit hope that they will credit our reports. We cannot witness to ourselves.
We must be recognized.
Ricoeur’s understanding of the address of testimony is perhaps most apparent in Time and Narrative concerning the historian’s debt to the dead. He begins: “the stringent law of creation which is to render as perfectly as possible the vision of the world that inspires the artist, corresponds feature by feature to the debt of the historian and reader with respect to the dead.”255
He later adds that “the right of a past corresponds with a debt we owe the dead.” That is, the historian “owes” just as much to the subjects of her history as the artist owes to the subjects of his art. For histories to exist as history rather than as fiction, the products of historical study must bear some expressed relation to the lived events of the past and particularly to the people who lived them. This relationship might be nuanced or complex or conditioned by perspective – indeed, it seems impossible to say even how far such conditioning would go – but this relationship must persist nonetheless in order to speak the truths of history.
254 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 255 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 177.
133 In other words, as a question of genre, history must be recalled as well as recorded if it is to be history. The debt the historian owes to the dead runs along a fragile tissue of connection, not because the historian will re-enact the past but because they will imagine it – and here we might consider Ricoeur’s model of metaphor and how that still functions when the author is dead. But we also might consider what Ricoeur means when he says that history is the “epic of the victims, of the suffering.”256
This Ricoeurian argument about the dead is surely a moment for pure Levinasian pause.
Do the dead call out to us? Is the debt written in the faces of the victims of history an intrusive, primordial obligation that the historian cannot ethically escape? Ricoeur seems here to invoke the sense of the tragic evoked by Walter Benjamin: “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing….”257 Do the dead in this sense give birth to the historian, our own angel of history? Certainly there can be no question of reciprocity in the sense of the dead returning the favor in an ethical sense. This might be what makes them a unique case for Ricoeur. Others, still living, carry the ability to respond in kind, and so do not impose upon us the same burden that the dead do.
Whatever the case, in the debt of the historian to the dead, Ricoeur shows us that indebtedness can be productive as well as imposing upon us. Nor does this imposition of the
256 Ricoeur, 174–79. 257 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 257, http://pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_web/ES- 200A/Week%202/benjamin_ps.pdf.
134 dead upon the living seem alienating; indeed it may be the beginning of a strange communion.
So it seems as though Ricoeur here, if he does not exactly agree with Levinas, certainly would not stand against him. Ricoeurian history reads at least somewhat like a conversation that historians have with the dead. This is true, of course, not in the sense that the dead can provide new facts about their existence (though historical discovery can be likened to this), but in the sense that there is not a sum total amount of information that can be known about them. Because they were people like ourselves, the lives of the witnesses of history can be imagined and re- imagined in a number of different ways, which will be either more or less faithful, yet never utterly exhausted. The salient ethical distinction of history, we might say, is not between the living and the dead but between past persons and past objects and events. We owe an ethical debt to the former, and a debt of recognition to the latter.258 Indeed, it is our attempt to recognize the lives of others that animates the historian in the first place.
Our studies have lead us to suspect that we would not have the same assurance of ourselves if we did not testify in a world of other selves. Indeed, since we can, in Ricoeur’s thinking, owe a debt to others that is productive and not alienating, we are prone to wonder, in
Levinasian fashion, if we ought not consider the two Ricoeurian senses of attestation in reverse order. That is, we might consider that we work out our sense of attestation among others before we employ it internally, to trust ourselves. We certainly cannot consider the two senses in isolation, not if we want to render how a self functions in actual experience. But if there is an ethical “end” to selfhood as Ricoeur seems to think, then we have good Aristotelian grounds, too,
258 “Reenactment is the telos of the historical imagination, what it intends, and its crowning achievement. The historical imagination, in return, is the organon of reenactment. If we pass from the category of the Same to that of the Other in order to express the moment of what is no more in standing for the past, it is still the the imaginary that keeps otherness from slipping into the unsayable. It is always through some transfer of Same to Other, in empathy and imagination, that the Other that is foreign to me is brought closer.” Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 184.
135 for thinking that living with others might inform the substance of the self. That is, could it be that we “first” testify in and to a world of others “before” we have the assurance that we are ourselves?
Ricoeur does provide the conceptual structure to ask this question. He ties selfhood to narrative, a type of discourse where, because of its emphasis on a narrator, the dialogical structure is less apparent than it is in metaphor. So Ricoeur does not emphasize the quality of address implicit in the manifestations of that structure, even as he carries it forward into the self.
It is in this way that the Ricoeurian self ends up not seeming to require primordial alterity in the same way that metaphor does. But we submit that, to be consistent with and follow from all the rest of the dialogical framework of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical period – as well as to accord with the best empirical evidence about human development that we have – his version of the self does require that we consider testimonial attestation before private assurance. And Levinas provides a means to do so.
For the testimony of attestation to precede the assurance of attestation, there must be a non-verbal form of testimony. After all, it makes little sense to say that public attestation can precede private attestation if public attestation depends on language, as it certainly seems to do.
Witness and testimony are all eminently verbal events that are wound up in discourse, unlike the assurance one has in one’s own movements, which is primordial and wordless. We have little reason to doubt that one of a child’s very first assurances must be that when he or she wants to reach for a toy, the hand that reaches for it is his or her own. So it would seem that our supposition that the second sense of attestation, i.e., that one’s assurance of oneself unfolding in the public realm precedes the assurance we have of ourselves, is dead on arrival. But of course
136 we recall from our second chapter that Levinas does provide us with, in fact, a testimony that is more than verbal.
Levinas surely means the responsibility he imagines to be that of a moral call. Yet
Levinasian testimony establishes a summons which exhibits me for others, and it is – perhaps not surprisingly – the structure of this summoning that matters, more than its moral content. Being presented in appearance, “summoned,” I do not represent myself. In fact, in Levinasian subjectivity, I need not reflect upon myself at all, but only be myself responding to others. The structure of Levinasian testimony interests us because we may also, perhaps, present it in more concrete terms, and say that I smile in response to my mother’s smile before I have sufficient cognition to know that smile as my own. This leads us to wonder if Ricoeur ever considered that his ethical call to live with and for others in just institutions might be primordial in the
Levinasian sense as well.
3.6. Understanding other minds makes possible our own self-understanding, just as the care of another, in immemorial natality, allows the very trust that Ricoeur proposes
There is a great deal of scientific evidence to inform our understanding of the effect of other people on the self’s development. Mirror neurons allow us to soak up other’s actions and feelings, and strongly influence our bodies so that we shift to a state similar to the person we see.259 In essence, Daniel Siegel writes, “we come to resonate with the other person, and the two mes become a we. This whole set of connections – from mirror neurons to middle prefrontal maps enabling compassion and empathy – is called the resonance circuitry.”260 Touch, words, and the nonverbal components of speech all serve to “activate the very neuronal circuits that
259 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 308. 260 Siegel, 308, italics mine.
137 mediate the receiver’s emotional response: orienting attention, appraising meaning, and creating arousal.”261 Such sensitivity, true to all stages of life, is particularly acute in childhood, when
“patterns in the transfer of energy and information between minds can create organized strategies in relationships.”262 That is, the patterns through which we relate to our caregivers – or, really, the patterns through which they relate to us – can determine not only how we will frame our own self, but how we will relate to others in the future.263
The progression of human development Siegel outlines undermines Ricoeur’s portrait of subjectivity. Studies show that self-awareness first becomes a cognitive function in children of about 2 years of age.264 If subjectivity implies the ability to distinguish between an “I” and a
“you” in dialogue, dialectic, and recognition, as it seems to for Ricoeur,265 then this age of 2 years might mark the beginning of the Ricouerian project. True, much of what he has to say about the self actually comes later, as humans become “aware of themselves as existing, thinking, and acting,”266 and thus become capable of forming narratives about themselves as idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood) bound together in time.267 Yet surely we would not be remiss to ask what we could say about humans younger than 2 years, and whether that, too, might be important to ourselves – and thus to our understanding of ourselves as well.
As Siegel notes in his landmark The Developing Mind: “The ability to perceive and to understand other people’s minds, a form of metacognition” sometimes called “mentalization”
261 Siegel, 308. 262 Siegel, 308. 263 Siegel, 308. 264 Phillipe Rochat, “Five Levels of Consciousness as They Unfold Early in Life,” Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003): 718. 265 “Ricoeur admits the need for a recognition of alterity for truly ethical relations, but he seems to compensate immediately for the asymmetry inherent in such a notion with a demand for reciprocity and mutual exchange.” Katherine E. Kirby, “The Hero and Assymetrical Obligation: Levinas and Ricoeur in Proper Dialogue,” International Philosophical Quarterly 50:2, no. 198 (2010): 161. 266 Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” 267 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 3.
138 begins with the first year of life and is proposed to play a role in the unfolding of consciousness.... Seeing the mind of another seems to catalyze the development of self- awareness.”268 Thus we do not have scientific support for a vision of a Cartestian mind otherwise locked within itself reaching out to others. Nor do we have scientific support for a self that is only completed or confirmed by contact with alterity. Rather, what we have, at very early developmental stages, seems to be a self made possible by its recognition of and in the minds of others, and in response to them. Siegel continues: “We may be aware long before we remember that we are aware.... Innate neural features and their interaction with family communication patterns may each contribute to the timing and nature of how awareness of the self develops across childhood and beyond.”269 That is, not only do our relationships with others condition the nature of our self-understanding, they also condition when we first consider ourselves to be selves, when we first come to reflective consciousness. As a field, interpersonal neurobiology so emphasizes the input of relationship with others that Siegel includes relationships in his definition of what the mind is: “the embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”270 While one cannot talk about the self without talking about the mind at a constitutive level, one also cannot talk about the mind without talking about the formative presence of others in our mental lives: alterity.
Of course, much of the Ricoeurian corpus predates such research, so we can hardly fault him for not anticipating it. But we can note that much of what Levinas writes does anticipate these findings, by establishing the structure of the self’s dependence on, and emergence from,
268 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 42–43. 269 Siegel, 43. 270 Siegel, 7.
139 alterity.271 As the science seems to be bearing Levinas’ anthropology out,272 we might be wise to ask Levinas-inspired questions of other Ricouerian capacities, too. For example: how does the self learn to narrate? It seems too much to assume that everyone simply always already has such a capacity. And certainly, a clear-eyed anthropology could hardly fully understand adults while neglecting the period of their formation. So we refer to developmental science, which affirms that our capacities form in and through interaction with others.273 While there is still disagreement about precisely how much of our adult selves are formed during early childhood, and how much follows from later experience or simply comes from genetic components, there seems less dispute that what formation does occur in our earliest months is absolutely crucial.
As Brock Bahler summarizes a number of scholars applying Levinasian ideas to developmental psychology:
Lefort suggests that human development supports Levinas’ view of an asymmetrical ethics and radical passivity.... The child does not encounter the parent in the context of a “lateral exchange”…. The child does not initially encounter objects as “distinct” and “differentiated”…. The child is born into a world that is already organized by both a variety of human desires and needs…. As soon as the child is born, it is called to respond…. Diane Perpich recounts how the infant is not only dependent on the caregiver for basic needs, but is also dependent on the adult to be introduced to the world…. Perpich interprets Levinas’ account of pure passivity to mean that “others are not co- originary with the world…. They are the pre-original condition of the world.… Brian Vanderburg insists on…his belief that “developmental research provides empirical support for Levinas, and Levinas, in turn provides understanding for the ethics of relationships…. Joel Krueger continues, “Developmentally speaking, interiority is cogiven with exteriority; and the body, as both subject and object, mediates this dialectical process.”274
271 Though of course Levinas too seems largely concerned with adult persons, his philosophical equipment certainly incorporates children within its descriptive power. 272 Alternatively, in the case of a personal dispute Ricoeur did have with a contemporary, research also seems to be somewhat bearing out Jacques Lacan, who emphasized the early years of the mother-child relationship now crucial for research. 273 Brock Bahler, “Levinas and the Parent-Child Relation: A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Applying Levinas’s Thought to Developmental Psychology,” The Humanistic Psychologist 43 (2015): 133–34. 274 Bahler, 133–34.
140
Bahler offers a summary judgement of the research in the field: “The infant is originally being- for-other, as Levinas put it, laid bare and passive before the other rather than actively mastering the world.”275 To be sure, Bahler’s purpose is to critique those same scholars for offering too simple an understanding of Levinas, and he soon cautions that “Levinas’s description of the infant as pure susceptibility or pure vulnerability, or Lefort’s account that vision and perception are secondary to sensation, run the risk of disregarding any notion of cognition or rationality in the infant.”276 Indeed, Bahler soon goes on to call for a Merleau-Pontyian account of infancy which accounts for further empirical research that indicates that infants present likes and dislikes, as well as preferences and some facial recognition, from the very day of birth.277 Such a rendering does not allow for much Levinasian passivity in early childhood development as
Bahler understands it – or, for that matter, a learning of sensibility through purely passive imitation. Still, Bahler does not step away from Levinas entirely, and nor should we.
Ultimately, Bahler would describe the parent-child relation as a highly assymetrical mutuality rather than commit to a pure passivity in infancy and early childhood. He imagines this to be a rapprochement between Merleu-Ponty and Levinas, a dialectic of mutuality and asymmetry in which both thinkers, taken together, offer “a philosophical description of the parent-child relation that not only aligns with much of the current research in child development but also illuminates the ethical and dynamic aspects of this originary relationship that forms the background for the rest of our lives.”278 And he carries forward Merleu-Ponty’s conviction that
275 Bahler, 134. 276 Bahler, 134. 277 Though we would hasten to add that rudimentary preferences and inclinations indicate distinction, but do not necessarily constitute a self or a person in the way that Ricoeur, Levinas, or we ourselves would understand it. 278 Bahler, “Levinas and the Parent-Child Relation: A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Applying Levinas’s Thought to Developmental Psychology,” 145.
141 for all our infant passivity before stimulation, we do, as infants, come predisposed to process the world in ways unique to us; we also affect our caregivers in ways which, though not willed in the adult sense of conscious decision, certainly seem to be ways that we intend. Clearly, the very young have at least the rudimentary components of agency, though we cannot ascribe to them full agency as such.
We would be remiss if, in conclusion, we did not mention the fact that Bahler does note what Merleu-Ponty and Levinas do actually agree upon. Those are the several elements of passivity which we ourselves have emphasized: the infant is introduced to a world that is not its own, but ordered and weighted by others; infants are utterly dependent on their caregivers for several years; infants learn language as others use it; there is no equality between them and their caregivers; and, above all else, the self is grounded in its relation to the other.279 All in all, both
Bahler’s findings and the body of research he summarizes supply a robust understanding of early childhood which cannot be readily folded into either a narrative self or the reflective consciousness that seems so fundamental to it. The undeniable presence of an asymmetry in early childhood suggests difficulties for a self that demands reciprocity later. If the self is grounded in its relation to the other, there will always be at least one aspect of that relationship that cannot be reciprocal, symmetrical or mutual.
So it seems we can make our case that, when it comes to attestation, one testifies in a
Levinasian sense before one gains assurance of self-identity in the Ricoeurian sense. And this sense of testimony does, of course, even more clearly bear its dependence on alterity than does
Ricoeur’s more submerged dialogical structure. This becomes even more apparent when we
279 Bahler, 142.
142 reconsider the example of Levinasian testimony that we ourselves articulated in our second chapter: allusive testimony. In our study of metaphor, we have found that poets often take their cues from other poets, and the same is true for practitioners of any techne. Moreover, in our study of testimony, we have found through the concept of natality that people other than poets inflect other people, too. Our apprenticeship to others, our fundamental resonance under their influence, occurs even when that influence is not utterly communicable in language. Indeed, it may not be entirely knowable in language. But in any case, others inflect us, in our words and in other ways.
So Ricoeur is right, of course, to suggest that attestation as assurance allows us to be distinguished from and connected to our actions and the reasons for our actions. But he would have also been right to suggest that our reasons for our actions in some measure shape the self who performs those actions in the first place, and to suggest that those reasons can and often do come from others. The massive, albeit occasionally submerged continuity concerning alterity within the Ricouerian project – its necessary presence within metaphor, narrative, and discourse alike – can and should emerge through attestation in a Ricoeurian concept of the self.
Both the private assurance of one’s own identity and one’s bearing witness in a world of other selves are forms of trust based on credibility. After all, as we have seen, even the dead attest – and when they do, they do so in the form of witness. Their testimony is subject to interrogation, and – through different lines of questioning – the dead witness in varying ways.
The testimony of the dead bears witness to the fecund reality of attestation, akin to the reality of jurors being subject to the interminably dueling experts of courtroom experience. This is so not because one simply wishes to eschew any kind of propositional adequation or epistemic
143 foundations but because the truth of every case is so complex: expressible in language but not reducible to it.
Yet, that one cannot say all true things about the world does not mean that one can say no true things. Though Ricoeur might not have emphasized it himself, the brilliance of his understanding of metaphor – and Ricoeurian discourse in all its forms – is that a speaker and auditor both can and must experience, broadly, the same conversational and cognitive event, a shared mental “world” that, in the case of non-fiction, expresses the realities they physically share and, in the case of fiction, unfolds and presents it. In a Ricoeurian understanding, another person is not required to make truth true. That much is, presumably, taken care of by the state of the affairs in question. But another person seems required to make truth possible – so long as truth is something said in order to be understood, a shared cognitive event.
3.7. Attestation’s ties to discourse imply that it shares metaphor’s characteristics, and that we enter a world given to us, a moral world of the kind Ricoeur explores by the end of his career
Perhaps one truly does encounter difficulty understanding oneself without considering one’s ties to others, and perhaps those bonds really are more ethical than epistemic. Ricoeur has claimed that attestation, which we have studied here, is the key to Oneself as Another. It has even been claimed that attestation is the bridge between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Ricoeur’s ontology. As Sebastian Kauffman writes:
attestation is the key to the three dialectics of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self: The dialectic between reflection and analysis, the dialectic between idem-identity and ipse- identity and the dialectic between oneself and other. In these three dialectics, attestation, as the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering, allows the self to appropriate its otherness: The otherness of its capacities, the otherness of its identity, the otherness of its body, of other people and of its conscience. In other words, the self gains the confidence of being a self through the confidence that the actions it performs and the words it says are its own actions and words; the confidence that the narratives it tells express its own
144 identity; the confidence that the body is its own body; the confidence that the esteem of others mediates its own esteem and that the values that it embraces are its own values.280
If attestation does in fact bridge Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and ontology, and if Ricoeur’s ontology really does lead him to consider the range of social issues that immediately follow Oneself as
Another – collective memory, forgiveness, justice, and social action – then we who have deeply appreciated Levinas will note that Ricoeurian attestation certainly presents a very interesting bridge. The arc of Ricoeur’s career after Oneself as Another, an arc prefigured by the development of the argument in the book itself, does suggest the possibility that attestation forms such a bridge, if it does not say so outright.
In this vein of realizing possibilities, we hope to have shown that if attestation is the key to Oneself as Another, then discourse is the metal of which that key is made, and vital to all the
Ricoeurian argument that follows.281 Without discourse, Ricouerian attestation does not seem possible. It is discourse, after all, that first places me in the world: “When a name was given me at birth, this name was inscribed in public records.”282 And it is discourse that places me in the world again; when I speak I make my private thoughts available to the public, and present myself to another person’s perspective. Through speech, we designate ourselves in the world as agents to whom speech and action may be imputed.283 Along with the ability to act, it is our ability to speak that forms the foundation of our agency.
Discourse is an inescapable part of Ricoeurian attestation. What we hope to have added in this chapter to the general Ricoeurain understanding of attestation is that if discourse is an
280 Kauffman, “The Attestation of Self as a Bridge Between Hermeneutics and Ontology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.” Abstract. 281 To torture this metaphor, action would be the force with which the key turns. 282 Kauffman, “The Attestation of Self as a Bridge Between Hermeneutics and Ontology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur,” 30. They cite here Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 53. 283 Kauffman, “The Attestation of Self as a Bridge Between Hermeneutics and Ontology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur,” 23.
145 inescapable element of attestation, then the qualities of discourse exemplified in metaphor are an inescapable part of attestation, too. Namely, these are the qualities of possessing a primordial alterity, of being a shared cognitive event, and of implying a primordial address. Discourse requires alterity at a fundamental level. Conversation requires another person just as surely as metaphor does, and we may glimpse this in Ricoeur’s articulation of the dialectic of understanding and explanation.284 At the same time, it is not only the case that we must intend our conversation to be a conversation, and invoke another person; if our conversation is to have been a conversation, the other person involved must come away with a minimal understanding of what we conversed about; they must have, at the very least, received it as a conversation. This invokes the third characteristic of discourse, and that is that discourse is, from the very moment of its conception, intended for another particular person in time. Each discourse is unique and uniquely addressed by personality as well as time and location. The presence of another, overt or implied, shapes every discourse not only in style, but also in content and in structure. Discourse both pre-supposes and addresses the other in ways that are not merely ornamental.
Ricoeur might have carried these three characteristics of discourse –primordial alterity, being a shared cognitive event, and being addressed – forward into an understanding of one’s own self. It is fascinating to think that Ricoeur most clearly abandons the language of vitality precisely when, in Oneself as Another, he most fully addresses the theme of the self – precisely that subject which, we suspect, would most benefit from a discussion of vitality. If the implication of our first chapter is that it is others that breathe life into metaphor – both by
284 Indeed, we may supplement Ricoeur’s earlier articulation of the dialectic of explanation and understanding with the following apt summation, which comes immediately after: “If philosophy is concerned with ‘understanding’ it is because, at the very heart of epistemology, understanding testifies to our being as belonging to a being that precedes all objectifying, all opposition between subject and object” (emphasis mine). Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding,” 143.
146 realizing its first squall of cognitive surprise, and then later by realizing and re-realizing the fecund possibilities of its polysemic interpretations – then so too might others be said to breathe life into us, in a very Ricoeurian fashion, by imputing to us our actions even before we can impute them to ourselves – either our deeds or our words. Similarly, if the implication of our second chapter is that we can and do resound with the influence of others even in ways that language might not be able to articulate – both by first receiving through sensibility the world that they present, and then later by presenting ourselves to that world as their unique children, apprentices, or disciples – then so too do we resound with the influence of others when we speak in discourse addressed to them, and when we present ourselves in their world.
For the world that we experience and in which we emerge is from the very first a gift, a kind of shared cognitive experience, as others present models of acting in the world that we mirror from the very first moments of our lives. The world that we inhabit is not our own – at least, not ours alone, nor ours first in sequence. Current scientific literature indicates that it is not only the case that we have a childhood wherein we learn a sensibility from others, as we discussed in the second chapter. It is also the case that our childhood has a childhood, cradled in its first two years, during which our minds do not form independently as we gain our capacities, including speaking and making metaphor, the very kind of speech that most clearly exemplifies our reliance on others.
Unfortunately, Ricoeur’s emphasis on others does seem to begin in, and return to, the task of reflective self-consciousness. But if Oneself as Another might be accused of flaws of mis- emphasis and omission, then his later, more other-centered studies of forgiveness, justice, and social action might be understood as a kind of course correction. Yet we suspect that is all that it would need to be. Alterity is enmeshed in the Ricoeurian project from beginning to end, from the
147 ubiquitous interpretation of symbols through his case for a full-fledged anthropology in Oneself as Another. And our reliance on others indicates not that Ricoeur is wrong to identify a self- understanding that depends on the input of others, but only that such reflective consciousness is not, necessarily, the best paradigm for understanding the totality of our own subjectivity or the world in which we live. And it is to the last of his works, The Course of Recognition, written near the end of Ricoeur’s own journey, that we now turn. It is, we will find, a work very much concerned with the inter-relatedness of oneself and others.
148 CHAPTER FOUR:
RECOGNIZING EMPATHY
4.1. We hope we have shown that: polysemic, vital metaphor requires others for its acquisition as a skill; Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative underplays the possibilities that imaginative narrative might explore; Ricoeurian discourse emphasizes that sharing understanding requires the minds of others We have charted a course, so far, through what may have seemed a severely limited sampling of Ricoeurian topics. But we have done so thematically, hoping that each of our chapters shows a place where Ricoeur’s thought does work with alterity as a fundamental structure. We also hope that these intersections suggest where he might have developed that connection more rigorously, or maintained it more carefully: metaphor’s structural reliance on alterity, testimony’s implicit debt to an audience, and attestation’s reliance on discourse are all places where a different emphasis on Ricoeur’s part might have resulted in an even more robust anthropology later. Each of our topics has been an area of rich promise and, in our opinion, of missed opportunity.
Our first chapter highlighted Ricoeur’s signal contribution to our understanding of metaphor: metaphor lives, and in its polysemy describes a living, polysemic world. Indeed, in creating a rich, imaginary world, metaphor may even push the boundaries of the possible through a shared re-imagining of the actual world that we do experience. Yet Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor, relying on Aristotle’s articulation of metaphorical craft as the result of “unguessed genius” fails to place metaphor’s origin within its proper context: techne, craft. Had Ricoeur followed through on metaphor’s status as rhetorical craft, he would have been able to trace metaphor’s origins to a didactic, mimetic relationship between a master and apprentice of metaphor engaged in creative play – not so different from, or more mysterious than, the crafting of fine pottery or elaborate cloth. Such a move would have, we asserted, highlighted metaphor’s
149 nature as a personal sensibility returned to a public realm; it would also have emphasized metaphor’s structural reliance on alterity even before the moment of its creation. For it is only when we understand and by a certain measure adopt how another understands the world that we can understand their sensibility, and begin to craft a vision of our own.
In the second chapter, our study of testimony, we traced Ricoeur’s forceful development of narrative as a means of constituting identity through emplotment. We found it to be a robust conceptual system of an ego struggling to break free from the alienation and isolation concomitant with Cartesian formulations; there is certainly no denying that narrative as Riceour describes it forms a vast part of selfhood. Yet we hope that our secondary encounter in the chapter – with the work of Levinas – shows that Ricoeur’s narrative understanding of identity, robust as it is, cannot account for any aspect of an experience that might surpass the limits of language – something which, by simple definition, every meeting with an Other must include.
Levinas provides a helpful corrective here, suggesting a testimony that relies not on one’s own search for knowledge or meaning, but on the moral call that others bring to us – allowing us to emerge as ourselves in response. We embody this Levinasian form of testimony that is not verbal, but is nonetheless constitutive of a self that is itself more fully formed for its dependence on alterity. Without a call, we would never be able to respond, and would never be – indeed, would never have been – ourselves. A vital component of our own identity has always come from responding to others – not merely to their words, but to their very presence. In some sense, we may be said to be that response.
Our third chapter, on attestation, sought to explain Ricoeur’s understanding of the trust we implicitly place in ourselves to act as ourselves – and its importance to our identity. Yet we sought also to show how Ricoeur’s failure to emphasize a second sense of attestation that he
150 himself broaches – the way in which our trust in ourselves must be worked out in a world of other people – highlights an opportunity Ricoeur could have taken to recognize the continuing contribution discourse makes to identity. Because Ricoeur defines discourse as someone saying something to someone about something, our need to connect to others, in a world of others, cannot be denied.
Discourse bears an implicit address that conditions its very possibility – and because discourse, particularly narrative, contributes so much to Ricoeur’s understanding of identity, his articulation of that understanding might have been more overtly shaped by alterity as a theme than it seems to have been. Had the role of alterity in Ricoeur’s notion of discourse and the self been more clear, Ricoeur’s articulation of attestation – and hence, the self – could have been more in accord with various scientific findings which indicate that our responses to others developmentally precede any summary notion we might have of ourselves – including whether or not to impute actions to ourselves. Others model for us what a “self” looks like, and it is as we imitate them that we come to understand how we ourselves move in and interact with the world.
In this our fourth chapter, we will focus on recognition, and note Ricoeur’s signal development of recognition as an inexhaustible struggle which relies on the judgment of others.285 Yet, as suggested by the very dialogical structure of metaphor which Ricoeur himself has pointed out (if not fully developed), a sense of empathy modeled on the idea of the human family more clearly reflects fundamental biosocial realities than would a sense of recognition modeled on the political realm. We certainly agree that, to recognize myself, I must first be recognized.286 At the same time, however, we would assert that recognition falls short of being a
285 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 69. 286 Ricoeur, 69.
151 full acknowledgment of humanity, and does not describe the deepest bonds upon which society – or persons – might be built. Not only are we, from birth to death, inescapably social animals, we are bound together chemically and physiologically through biological mechanisms like empathy that also contribute to our own innermost development and nurture.
Even when we might not be able to understand one another in ways that language can articulate – and even in those cases where language is not present at all – empathy guarantees that we form and are formed by one another when we participate in one another’s emotional worlds. Empathy, as we shall see by the end of this chapter, points toward knowing the fuller humanity that emerges through encounters wherein humans might fundamentally, if not fully, understand one another. Empathy enriches and fills out the encounter that recognition begins, bringing both self and other closer to mutual understanding. It also completes our previous chapters, providing 1) a way that a sensibility, a way of understanding the world, can be reliably learned, even more broadly than with techne 2) that our child-like capacity to respond to others comes from others to form identity, and 3) that our inner selves can carry the impress of others even as we strive toward mature subjectivity.
If we are trying to complete Ricoeur’s anthropology with a largely Levinasian twist, it is in his later work that we find the easiest fit, and Ricoeur himself most open to complement and completion. And of these, Ricoeur wrote The Course of Recognition last; it was published the year of his death.287 There are several reasons for our taking it up. First, we would allow Ricoeur far too little credit if we implied that such a forceful, adroit intellect as his should have had no awareness of any limitation to his earlier work. Indeed, Riceour acknowledges the same concerns
287 Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.”
152 we share with feminist critics with regard to his emphasis on capability in hermeneutic and anthropological work.288 Secondly, we simply find Ricoeur’s later work, where he turns to a concern for social issues, to be significantly more emphatic of alterity than the presentation of his anthropology in Oneself as Another.
Ricoeur’s later placement of greater emphasis on the other may be due not only to a change in topical content but also to a change in Ricoeur’s own thinking. Whereas his hermeneutical period is grounded in his phenomenological thinking – and retains phenomenological assumptions of epistemology as first philosophy and the foundations of the self – Ricoeur later places politics as primordial to thinking about the world.289 This seems a change too significant to overlook. Surely it is far easier, for example, to find here a rapproachment between Levinas saying the good is the prime consideration and Ricoeur saying that the political ought to be. Late in his career, Ricoeur sounds much more like Levinas, especially on the issue of alterity, than he does at any other point that we have found. We can only imagine what he might have said if he had read Levinas then with new eyes, or written a re- consideration of his anthropology with political emphasis. One does not imagine that he would simply agree with us, of course – he still does not seem to proffer family as a potentially just institution290 – but one might hope that he would be sympathetic to our aim. Still, it is fair to say
288 As Joy quotes Ricoeur: “That there is not only a female way of suffering as well as of acting, and that my analysis of common humanity suffers the limits of a male way of thinking and writing is something that I in no way would deny.… I would like first of all to underscore my emphasis, since Oneself as Another, on the importance of the idea of homo capax as integrating a wide conceptual field. With this theme I have tried to bring together those diverse capabilities and incapacities that make human beings acting and suffering beings.” Morny Joy, “Recognition in the Work of Paul Ricoeur,” in Between Suspicion and Empathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 529. 289 Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 162. 290 Though he does discuss family in a positive light regarding recognition, he concludes his reading of Hegel by distinguishing family from political institutions because of the number of people involved. Moreover, by framing recognition in the midst of a struggle, Ricoeur implicitly grants a Hobbesian view of antagonistic politics as primordial which, we argue, is unnecessary. Ricoeur, 162.
153 that The Course of Recognition might be as close as Ricoeur ever comes to writing our imagined book, and his treatment of recognition certainly warrants exploration on its own terms.
4.2. Ricoeur’s study of the definitions of recognition leads him from the more active meaning of recognition in the Greek epics to a more interdependent and moral meaning of recognition in the promise
Curiously, Ricoeur begins his study of recognition by turning to the dictionary – or, more accurately, a number of dictionaries – to determine what we have meant whenever we have said the word.291 He must do this, he notes, because there is no major philosophical work on recognition to draw upon.292 So he must chart his own course, and does this by examining the various uses of the word. He soon notes that the gaps between the meanings of recognition come from the “unsaid” of previous definitions.293
Ricoeur’s assessment of the way these definitions build upon each other is, we must note, a first, wonderful metonymy of Ricoeur’s own career, which begins each work answering the remaining questions from the last. And, just as in the arc of his career, there is a larger trend in the use of recognition that grows as he proceeds from definition to definition. That second, larger trend is for the meanings of recognition to move from the active to the passive. Since the lexicons Ricoeur studied list the definitions of a word chronologically, the earliest, mostly epistemic definitions of recognition are much more likely to deal with things, and later, social and moral definitions of recognition more likely to deal with people – thus providing the second progression from active to passive meanings that parallels the chronological one.294
291 Ricoeur, 2. 292 Ricoeur, 1. 293 Ricoeur, 4. 294 Ricoeur, 8.
154 Thus, in the first chapter Ricoeur grapples with the more active and cognitive senses of recognition. Primarily, his argument seems to be that, even at this level of understanding, recognition as a purely cognitive phenomenon does not hold, because any recognition without some emotional sense of loss is simply knowing.295 That is, without some emotional charge, the first definition of recognition, related to perception, would not even be recognition, but would instead be merely a euphemism for a word we already in fact have: knowing. We can see this when we consider the case of the unrecognizable, as being unable to recognize a person seems significantly different from being unable to recognize an object that we own, which in turn feels significantly different from being unable to recognize an object that is not ours.296
The difference between objects and persons comes about, for Ricoeur, because a crucial sense of all recognition lies not only within the mind of the recognizer, but also has to do with the nature of the recognized. A person can become unrecognizable through disguise or transformation – a tree or pen less commonly so. Moreover, when we do recognize someone in the sense of perceiving their identity, our very recognition implies that we have missed them previously, through absence or mistake. Ricoeur argues that this missing – the momentary sense of loss brought about through the absence of the recognized – cannot be simply temporal, as time passing from the moment we lose our house keys, say, until we find them does not result in this particular sense of recognition.297 What that time between non-recognition and recognition marks is the loss, or potential loss, implied by changing circumstance: Though I knew you, I did not at first recognize you, but now I do, and you have returned to my awareness. The first definition of recognition brings its frisson of suspense, fear, and relief. This is most exemplified in the famous
295 Ricoeur, 65. 296 Ricoeur, 62. 297 Ricoeur, 65.
155 dinner party at end of Proust’s Time Regained. Ricoeur notes the powerful moment when
Proust’s protagonist gapes at those he once knew, now disfigured by age as if they’d been masked.298 Thus even in the first, simplest senses of recognition we see an emerging distinction between persons and things and the definition of recognition as a more than cognitive act.
Recognition always requires some emotional charge.
Themes of personhood and the affective redouble as Ricoeur traces another group of definitions of recognition in the second chapter. These definitions owe their origin of use to the
Greek epics where heroes contemplate and act, referring to their actions as their own even if they have worked against their own will.299 Ricoeur notes, with Aristotle, that their language marks them as centers of activity, and that it is for their acts that Greeks would be recognized.300
Recognition, in this sense, is responsibility through decision.301 For the Greeks, what is in the subject is within the power of the subject.302 Students of Ricoeur will no doubt note the close semantic proximity to attestation here, and of course Ricoeur does as well, noting that his hermeneutic of the self, which depends on attestation, includes the “I can” capacities – particularly the capability for speech.303 Rioeur writes that “I” means the one who is speaking, doing things with words.304
There is here a bias from the Greek sources, one which Ricoeur later acknowledges: that of understanding a capacity – in this case, the capacity to act – as a power in the positive sense only. Hannah Arendt informs us that powers are not only positive, as the almost accidental
298 Ricoeur, 66. 299 Ricoeur, 70. 300 Ricoeur, 70. 301 Ricoeur, 71. 302 Ricoeur, 84. 303 Ricoeur, 93. 304 Ricoeur, 95.
156 development of the will in Christianity occurs as Paul considers his own torn nature: he does not do the good that he wants to do, and does do the bad that he does not want to do. This is a somewhat more complex picture of the human mind than that offered by Plato, for whom I must be either commanded by reason or driven by desire, 305 or than conceived by Aristotle, for whom proairesis allows us to prefer, and thus to choose between, reason and desire. Rather, Arendt cites Paul as the signal development for the idea of the will, since this notion was required to explain a mind that is neither choosing nor commanded, but divided – in fact, incapable, in spite of choosing and in spite of being commanded.306 Arendt notes that Paul reveals a capacity that is not initially active and effective, but which must be healed to emerge307 – and Ricoeur’s elision of the more Pauline notion of capacity certainly warrants note as we continue to consider the origin of capacities such as metaphor.
Yet even in the Greek epics, no agent acts alone. Responsibility is a social event. Ricoeur notes in his second chapter that a difficulty for these definitions of recognition, which place responsibility in the hands of human agents, is that they must distinguish between act and accident.308 Thus the language about recognition shifts from epistemic to moral understandings.
That is, we do not tend to attribute to agents acts which they did not intend; instead, we call these acts accidents, and attribute them to causes. The sense of recognition that we do apply to people, as when we praise or blame them for their actions, seems to imply an audience which discerns intent in order to award that praise or to apply blame.309 Thus for a historical application of this
305 Hannah Arendt, “Two/Willing,” in The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation On How We Think, One-Volume Edition (San Francisco, CA: Harcourt, Inc., 1971), 58, https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/life-of-the-mind.pdf. 306 Arendt, “Two/Willing,” 64–65. 307 Arendt, 66. 308 Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 95–96. 309 Ricoeur, 104–9. See 104-109 for Ricoeur’s whole summary of imputability.
157 kind of recognition as an increasingly social responsibility, Ricoeur turns to the phenomenon of the promise.
The notion of promise arises amidst a discussion of Bergson, who notes that recognition is both necessary for survival, as in Hobbes, and sought after for its affective value, as in
Hegel.310 It is the affective value of recognition that Riceour picks up in his discussion of the promise, and will continue into his crucial chapter on mutual recognition.311 For promises certainly come loaded with affective charge. Like memories, promises presume the possibility of their being broken, and press against that possibility. We remember despite our inclination to forget, and we keep our promises despite – in a way, because of – our ability to break a promise.
So there is a notion of negation or contradiction in both capacities, but in promise there is also the notion of address: We promise to other people, despite our ability to break a promise; promise comes loaded with the frisson of the possibility of disappointment, as well as the possibility of fulfillment. It is into this possibility of disappointing others that we step as we bring our promise with us into our future. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt reminds us in The Human
Condition, without the promise we would not have much of a future at all – or, for that matter, much of a self. “Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities – a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.”312
310 Ricoeur, 126. 311 Ricoeur, 127–28. 312 Arendt, The Human Condition, 237.
158 A promise is, for Ricoeur, a very specific instance in which one’s capacity to do things with words is in no way an ethically neutral position. Unlike my own responsibility for, say, having killed a lion, the other to whom we are responsible in a promise is counting on us and on the reliability of our word and we must answer to this expectation.313 That is, the charge of the promise is not only affective, but inescapably inter-personal. Thus, says Ricoeur, does this sense of recognition grant attestation its ethical justification.314 Whether one keeps a promise or breaks it, the very utterance of that promise steers one onto moral shoals. In the promise, Ricoeur brings us to a broader understanding of capacity as responsibility: rights do not suffice for social recognition because humans aren’t simply atomic rational actors. We must move to a discussion of preserving or enhancing human capacities – as in, for example, a capacity to act against abuse
– that can itself protect humans from many forms of abuse. Such capacities, Ricoeur reminds us, would be attested as they were enacted, rather than granted individually by political states.
Having made the turn to the political realm, Ricoeur in his third chapter follows recognition into its most passive definitions. There are, Ricoeur notes, two broad senses in which recognition may appear in the social, moral world: reciprocity and mutuality.315 While we have clearly seen much reciprocity in the Hobbesian, modern West of the rational social contract, we have not seen as much mutuality in the way that Greeks would have understood a friendship between “each other.”316 Reciprocity in our most common philosophical understanding goes through Kant, for whom all substance is in co-space as plaintiff and defendant.317 Reciprocity is thus primordially oppositional as it flows from Hobbes and Kant into Husserl and Levinas alike.
313 Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 134. 314 Ricoeur, 134–35. 315 Ricoeur, 151. 316 Ricoeur, 152. 317 Ricoeur, 153. Ricoeur here seems to be merely summarizing the organization of space and time by separation; two bodies cannot occupy the same space at once, and conflict in this sense.
159 It is true that both of the latter do try to account for occasional cooperation: for Husserl in apperception – wherein our transcendent apperception allows us to constitute another “me”318 – and for Levinas in the Third.319 Yet the shape of reciprocity is that of reaching accord despite an original position that is, at best, alienated, and more often oppositional.
Thus, for Ricoeur, Husserl and Levinas both miss what is perhaps the deepest legacy of
Hobbes: that the political, and not the perceived or the ethical, is primordial.320 Before the rational negotiation about the modern state, humans are in the space of living among others with competing interests – indeed, that is the source of the need for rational negotiation in the first place.321 Hobbes, on his way to a reciprocal promise of liberty and power, does allow us to distinguish between laws which forbid and rights which authorize.322 But, Ricoeur asserts, this level of recognition doesn’t allow us to proceed to a recognition on the level of true equality:
“each other.”
Recognition on the level of true equality, which we might say seems closer to ‘regard’, is more robust than mere formal equality, as Hegel has pointed out. For Hegel, recognition requires considerably more sophisticated responses from us than a simple, rational negotiation if we are to cease violence. Hegel’s recognition demands three components: 1) a self-reflection which parallels our orientation toward the other, 2) a dynamism which parallels the affirmation of the other toward which our orientation inclines 3) an institutionalization which parallels the
318 Edmond Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns, Springer Classic Titles in Philosophy (Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1977), 111. 319 Though Riceour does not cite specific pages, from what he does say in the notes, he seems to be referring here to Levinas’s construction of political affinity in Otherwise Than Being and to Husserl’s construction of intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 154. 320 Ricoeur, 162. 321 As Ricoeur quotes Leviathan: “‘Reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men will be drawn to an agreement. These articles are what otherwise are called laws of nature. (78)’ The reason invoked here is nothing other than the calculation provoked by fear of a violent death.” Ricoeur, 162. 322 Ricoeur, 167–68.
160 hierarchy of levels that recognition affects, from the distinction of persons to the construction of the state.323 The social contract alone does not suffice. We can see this inadequacy unfolding throughout history, as the struggle for recognition remains bloody despite the perpetual negotiations of “rational” self-interest. Indeed, one way to understand the concept of a nation- state, that very political entity which would secure us against violence in exchange for a sacrifice of liberty, would be as the conversation about that negotiation, which must continually be revisited. The Hobbesian social contract is never finalized.
According to Ricoeur, recognition for Hegel is not a matter of survival but of natural right, not only a given faculty but also an actualization, as in the family.324 It is also a formality of right and exchange, a governing under justice.325 This is why, in Ricoeur’s understanding,
Hegel emphasizes Spirit as much as Hobbes emphasizes Nature, and the difference in emphasis is telling. In this way, says Ricoeur, recognition under Hegel moves from operating in a theater of rivalry, distrust, and glory to being enacted in a domain of love, law, and respect.326 Indeed, by Ricoeur’s reading of Hegel, family can be read as a mutual recognition of need in which patterns of attachment and separation build a form of confidence that keeps families together.327
In this more Hegelian context, the law goes from being that which restrains us from violence in the name of security to that which leaves us free to respect each other.328 It allows social esteem as a larger shared value.329 This positive politics of recognition, says Ricoeur, is a direct rejoinder to Hobbes.330 The difficulty for Ricoeur is translating this trust from the small number
323 Ricoeur, 172–73. 324 Ricoeur, 182. 325 Ricoeur, 179. 326 Ricoeur, 182. 327 Ricoeur, 189. 328 Ricoeur, 202. 329 Ricoeur, 202. 330 Ricoeur, 216.
161 of people within a family to the larger numbers of people involved in state or society.331 The translation required is from reciprocation to mutuality, as in a ceremonial exchange of gifts.332
4.3. Ricoeur’s study of recognition and the gift establishes the origins of a capacity in other persons, rather than the self, undermining a Hobbesian view of the political
Gifts can move away from the realm of reciprocity because they take us away from the ordinary marketplace. Ricoeur reminds us that merchants couldn’t be citizens in ancient Greece because they were not trusted.333 When Greeks regarded “each other” they did so in a way that was more than economic – a way that, perhaps, Socrates reminded his students of when he demanded no tuition. Though Ricoeur notes that the marketplace historically wins (there are no more gift-dependent professors), gifts themselves do still exist as markers of time and occasion.334 The gift is festive, optative. If the gift inspires an economy, it is not one of reciprocity, of equal exchange, but of further gift-giving to others not involved in the initial exchange. After all, gifts given in return cannot mark the same occasion as gifts given for the first time.335 Gift-giving in the mode of the ceremony places us in the realm of mutuality, where alterity is, for Ricoeur, at its height. It is in giving gifts that we place ourselves “before others.”
Now there are, we might note, several issues at play in Ricoeur’s work on recognition that have crucial bearing upon our overall project of drawing the origins of metaphor as a synecdoche for the genesis of persons. First we note Ricoeur’s own shift – within The Course of
Recognition itself – from an agent who initiates the actions he or she has proclaimed in the
331 Ricoeur, 191. 332 Ricoeur, 219. 333 Ricoeur, 234. 334 Ricoeur, 239. 335 As Ricoeur quotes Anspach: “Without initiative, there is no gift possible.” Ricoeur, 230.
162 manner of the Greek epics to the rather more humbling presentation of gifts before others by the end of his book. In the latter, one may be either accepted or rejected, praised or welcomed in response to the gesture of a gift. Second, we note here the increasing reliance on others that recognition shows: to speak, Ricoeur writes, is to expect to be heard.336 And to be heard, to find a hearing, is, of course, to be recognized.
The proximity of recognition to an audience leads us to note that, for Ricoeur, recognition remains linked with attestation: “there is a close semantic relationship between attestation and self-recognition… in recognizing that they have done something, these agents implicitly attest that they were capable of doing it.337 Can we extrapolate from this relationship of recognition to attestation that the requirement for alterity that we found in attestation will have a parallel in
Ricoeurian recognition? Since Ricoeur does find a requirement for alterity in the later definitions of recognition, this symmetry must certainly at least be possible. Finally, in the notion of the gift’s incommensurability we are returned, as we are by the testimony of the dead, to the notion of a debt which cannot be repaid. Yet this is so not – as in the case of Levinas – because of the quantity of the debt but because of the quality of the debt itself. We cannot judge the gift by the same standard we do marketplace exchanges because it simply isn’t one.
We note, in summary, that The Course of Recognition follows roughly the same arc as
Ricoeur’s career: from an interest in the self, particularly in the will’s “I can” to an interest in society, particularly through mutuality’s “I give.” While Ricoeur has without a doubt fulfilled his own intent of authoring a significant work focused entirely on the subject – The Course of
Recognition integrates, and in a way culminates, the major themes Riceour has adopted since
336 Ricoeur, 253. 337 Ricoeur, 91–92.
163 Oneself as Another: memory and speech acts, social life, responsibility and the imputation of morality, and – not least – the ethical paradigm of living with and for others in just institutions. A virtue of the way Ricoeur treats recognition is that we can see it functioning at nearly every social level, from the intimacy of the family to the diplomatic negotiations of international relations.
But, with respect to how The Course of Recognition functions within the Ricoeurian corpus, its most salient virtue for our purposes may be the particular geneology that it provides: at long last, here Ricoeur provides the origin of a capacity. We recognize ourselves after we are first recognized by others.338 It is in this way that Ricoeur finally unites a fundamental cognitive stratum of the self with the very social relations that ground the just institutions to which his ethics points. If Ricoeur had spelled out what The Rule of Metaphor implicitly argues – that we learn metaphor, as a kind of dialogical techne, from others – then he would have made a point not so dissimilar from the one he ends up finally making in The Course of Recognition – that we learn recognition, as a kind of social skill, from others. If other people turn out to be the origin of very many other Ricoeurian capacities, it would open much interesting philosophical ground for exploration indeed.
338 Though Ricoeur never explicitly makes the causal link between one kind of recognition and another, he does note the priority of alterity in genealogical recognition: “In short, because I was recognized as the son or daughter of, I recognize myself as such; and I am, as such, this inestimable object of transmission.” Ricoeur, 194. Then later, toward the end of his book, he notes, “As for this being-recognized itself, toward which the whole process leads, up to the end it has remained an aspect of mystery…. We have taken into consideration the tally of new personal capacities evoked by the struggle for recognition…. Here we could mention self-confidence, respect, and self- esteem, whose details we have also discussed.” 216-217. While this may not be enough, quite, to establish that we recognize because we are first recognized, given the precedence of being recognized and its importance throughout Ricoeur’s levels of recognition, we can certainly say that we do not recognize without being recognized. We would add, of course, that the priority of being recognized can be inferred, because surely being recognized as a son or daughter must be the first thing that anyone undergoes, and much must be delayed if this does not occur.
164 However, we would certainly be remiss not to note that Riceour’s exploration of the
Hegelian anerkenung – the inter-subjective recognition that allows recognition and creates objective spirit339 – does mitigate the Hobbesian view of reciprocity which emerges only through conflict – by offering instead the kind of mutuality that comes through friendship, as in the exchange of gifts.340 It is certainly salutary that when Ricoeur turns to the Greeks, he does so in order to transform the Homeric and epic “I will” into an understanding of the self and its capacities – and then extends those capacities to the “We can” of economics and of international responsibility.341 And it may be more salutary still that Ricoeur ultimately extends the
Anerkennung into the philosophy of the gift. For this extension might offer us a way, at last, through Ricoeur and Levinas alike.
Now, the gift has become something of an academic commodity in continental philosophy of late, with everyone from Ricoeur to Marion to Derrida writing about the topic.
Tersely summarizing the positions of these three will allow us to see different fundamental understandings of the gift – which will allow us to suggest how our own post-Levinasian
Ricoeurianism might allow us to navigate through the same dilemmas they all have faced. Of course, a terse comparison of the position of these three figures is itself a daunting challenge, and for it we shall rely upon the work of Antonin Malo, whose remarkable and summative concision matches a good Ricoeurian fairness to all parties involved. For Ricoeur, as Malo understands him, the gift seems to be an object given in a ceremonial ritual that conveys mutual
339 Paul Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, March 21, 2020, URL =
165 recognition;342 in giving you a gift, I recognize you as a person, as a colleague or friend or lover or as family. For Marion, the gift is quite different, as he brackets the gift’s ontological status in order to conclude that what matters most about the gift is that the giver abandon it and relinquish all ties;343 Marion suspends or brackets the actual ontological status of (let alone the recognition of) the giver, receiver, and object alike.344 For Marion the gift is the giving itself, and its purest case is the gift that can be neither returned nor possessed, in which case the gift happens simply and entirely when the giver considers it a gift, and when the recipient considers it acceptable.345
The gift for Marion is purely a phenomenon of givenness.
For Derrida, naturally, the theme of the gift is even more intractable and paradoxical. For him, the gift is the impossible; the three elements of the gift – the giver, the receiver, and the gift itself – create a paradox whose incompatible conditions make its very constitution impossible.
That is, a gift requires a recipient, but the recipient cannot know his or her status as recipient lest they become a debtor, in which case the gift ceases to have been a gift.346 Much the same is true of the donor, for as soon as the donor becomes aware that he or she had given, they also enter the economic circle of the marketplace, as they would then understand themselves to expect some return, whether by means of another gift or simply through the gratitude of the recipient.347 Even the gift itself can never be appraised or known as gift, lest its value in the economic marketplace be determined, and its status as gift annulled.
342 See Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 225. 343 Antonin Malo, “The Limits of Marion’s and Derrida’s Philosophy of the Gift,” International Philosophical Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2012): 156. 344 Malo, 157. 345 Malo, 158–59. 346 Malo, 151. 347 Malo, 152.
166 None of these understandings of the gift is completely satisfactory. As we will argue, it seems to us that Ricoeur’s understanding of the gift in the context of ceremonial recognition does not take sufficient account of the ways in which, and the extent to which, an exchange economy can enter the ceremony and undermine the gift’s status, through commodifying the ceremony itself if it lacks sufficient safeguards.348 And Antonin Malo, whose reading of Derrida and
Marion we have been citing, finds it perplexing that Marion, through the idea of saturation – in which that which is given to intuition exceeds that which consciousness can describe – places the given as a phenomenon that is somehow outside or beyond any phenomenological horizon.349
Such placing makes Marion’s notion at the very least, a paradox; presumably, any phenomenon would have to be subject to phenomenological inquiry, or it would be difficult to call it a phenomenon in the first place. Moreover, Malo asserts that Derrida’s aversion to the strict causality of economics – as when his giver cannot know that he or she is giving, lest an intention be driven by economic causes – overlooks the possibility of virtue developed either in a person or among a group, in which case the feeling of obligation to give can be understood not as a lapse into economics but as a drive to deepen human relationship.350
4.4. The phenomenon of the gift implies the possibility that familial love, and not self- interest or negotiated peace, may be the primary, primordial fact of our political lives.
So there seem to be, when considering the gift, many conceptual shoals to avoid. If one focuses too much on the event of giving, as Ricoeur seems to, the ceremony can become pro-
348 A pro-forma anniversary card without a signed addressee, for example, or perhaps even without a personalized message at all, would seem an underwhelming recognition to many. Indeed, we add those personal touches precisely to salvage the recognition implied when we want to give a gift. An understanding of the gift which does not incorporate this possibility seems incomplete. 349 Malo, “The Limits of Marion’s and Derrida’s Philosophy of the Gift,” 161. 350 Malo, 164.
167 forma, stilted, forced, itself bought and sold on the market of expectations and returns, bereft of personality and life. One can imagine similar problems if one considers the gift determined by giver or recipient or the gift itself. The elements of the gift truly seem to be at best mutually limiting – and perhaps, as Derrida fears, they really are “impossible” or madness.351 Certainly,
Marion’s saturated phenomenon that is, somehow, beyond the phenomenological horizon seems like it might well be impossible in a literal sense; it is certainly a paradoxical offering, subject to its own conceptual shoals.
So what are we to do? Malo suggests an alternative that we consider helpful and that perhaps even he did not take as far as he could have – the idea that not all economies are merely mercantile. That is, when we exchange gifts, we cannot help but exchange more than their monetary value. Inevitably, we also exchange esteem, relationship, symbols of personal value.352
In even an artificially mercantile situation where participants agree to exchange gifts of precisely matching value, it seems unlikely that many would find it equally satisfying to simply pass around cash money instead. The particularity of gifts, and the time and effort spent choosing them, seem to point to something like an economy of relations, where the object is to emphasize and perhaps deepen the bond between two people; it does not seem to stop at acknowledging them as persons, though it certainly may begin there. Ricoeur is right to establish the human and relational context that grounds the gift, even if he might not have landed on precisely the right element or considered all of its implications.
Yet Ricoeur suggests something surprisingly radical by his assertion of recognition as the determining factor of the gift, and that radicality lies, once again, in recognition’s genesis as a
351 Malo, 149. 352 Malo, 167.
168 capacity: we recognize after we are recognized by others. This implies that we can recognize because others recognize us. Yet they can also choose not to. Marion and Derrida both fear the economic entanglements of gift giving because these entanglements seem to reduce the gift to something programmed, rather than chosen. But if we can recognize because we are recognized by others, and giving gifts means entering a kind of relational economy, then we can also choose not to deepen this bond, or even to weaken or break it. Simply put, the gift considered in a relational context seems to be neither determined nor arbitrary, but as a possible response I might make to being recognized. In this way, the Derridian paradox of surrendering to a determining causality or giving way to arbitrary madness seems to be a false one. To have a reason to choose something does not negate every reason not to choose it, unless those reasons not to are overwhelming or prohibitive – which we have no reason to believe the reasons for gift-giving necessarily are. Conditioned, I am still free, for I can respond to certain conditions without having to respond to them in a particular way. That is, indeed, one way to understand the very nature of a capacity, and it allows us to steer clear of at least a few of the dangers others have encountered when considering the gift.
Yet the reasons for gift-giving may be at least slightly more compelling than Ricoeur’s commitment to the mutuality of friendship may imply, even as his capacity of recognition allows us to broach their possibility. That we are not the origins of our own capacity for recognition means that our response will be asymmetrical. As Malo writes:
Although reciprocity always exists in human gifts, it is not symmetrical but asymmetrical, one that is based on a transcendental relation between I and You that overcomes consciousness. At the beginning of life each of us is recognized without being able to recognize others. For that reason this transcendental relation is at the same time a gift and a duty: I must recognize others because I was first recognized by others.353
353 Malo, 168.
169 So not only is the gift not an option that is chosen arbitrarily, without reason, the reasons for choosing to give or not to give are not weighted equally. Thus, our choices between giving and not giving will not be arbitrary. We can and should give gifts to those whom we recognize, as we respond to the depth and quality of the relationships between us – even if we can still choose not to. Our relation to others will always be asymmetrical, if they are the ones who allow us our capacities, even the capacity to respond to them.
Given the asymmetrical nature of the giving relationship, it is difficult to avoid discussing the possibility of giving gifts while we are in debt – it is, indeed, possible that a very good reason for giving a gift may be a feeling of indebtedness: “I owe you my gratitude.” Coupled with this comes the notion that, and quite often the feeling that, the debt cannot be paid. Ricoeur already accepts this possibility of an incommensurable debt in the notion of a debt to the dead. Given this, might we not go in something of a different direction and ask: if the Other calls me to a debt
I cannot repay, a debt that is incommensurable by its nature to any response I might make, would not then any offer I make toward the other constitute a kind of gift all its own? Certainly it could not be considered a repayment or an attempt to repay, so long as the inability to do so is understood.
Finally, we would note that, for all Ricoeur’s laudatory work on recognition, we have to wonder if he retains too much of Hobbes to escape the struggle for the cessation of violence.
That is, even if we accept Ricoeur’s proposal that the political is primordial, are we necessarily correct to adopt Hobbes’s proposal that the political is violence mitigated by nothing other than a reciprocal, rational compact? Ricouer adds a move beyond the rational compact, but assumes it as a framework for his own vision of mutuality: in general, the recognition between equals would precede the mutuality between friends. Paul Redding, however, places Hegel’s location of
170 recognition within the human family,354 suggesting a different political primacy, albeit one on a different scale, where the mutual love between parents and children precedes, typically by many years, their recognition of one another as equals. Within the family’s more intimate context, might we not call familial love and care the primordial reality, one reinforced by the biological arc of our own lives from infancy to maturity – something which none of these thinkers has proposed?
Others’ recognition of us, as beings having relatable human feelings, would offer a more sophisticated and more empirical understanding of political life than the crude Hobbesian thought experiment that takes life to be “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Yet if we describe familial care as primordial, our understanding of the self will necessarily undergo some changes, in that it will become a self-in-development that has gone poorly if it has relied upon either violence or rational compact throughout.
After all, not many of our parents, and hopefully few of our teachers, consider us rational competitors with whom they had to bargain for resources, attention, and the cessation of violence
– or as others to whom they were simply equal. Rather, they treated us as persons whom they were leading into a maturity of personhood possibly even more robust and well-developed than their own, inculcating capacities such as imagination, passion, virtue, and skill. And they do this at a time when we could offer them precious little in return, at least in any rational or economic sense – and with no recompense at all guaranteed. Any understanding of a primordial political reality, then, has to include the nurture of other persons not only as a logical choice, but as a
354 “First of all, in Hegel’s analysis of Sittlichkeit the type of sociality found in the market-based civil society is to be understood as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition with the more immediate form found in the institution of the family: a form of sociality mediated by a quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling—love (PR: §§ 158–60).” Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.”
171 fundamental emotional and social drive. To put it rather bluntly, were it not for the empathetic care of those who parent us, and upon whom we are for several years utterly and absolutely reliant, each of us would have already found our lives to have been brutal and very, very short indeed. Without those specific others, and their specific care, we would have simply died.355
4.5. Personalized gifts rely on a level of empathy that reframes our political reality, from selves initially divided from others to persons connected in ways both positive and negative
Ricoeur scholars Allen Russels and Mary Gerhart remind us that recognition is, in the end, only one way of knowing and is not, by definition, one of the more robust and sophisticated ones. Indeed, in its most commonly used sense it is only one step above ignorance in epistemic relation.356 It is what we mean when we say “We recognize the problem.” More rigorous forms of knowledge would include appreciation … understanding, and comprehension.357 Granted, recognition as Ricoeur reads it in French might connote more of these than its anemic English translation, but even given a wider range of possibilities, Ricoeur’s final understanding of recognition as grateful acknowledgement seems to fall short of the mutual understanding that many experience in, say, familial love.
One thinks of the ceremonial gifts exchanged by state functionaries at various diplomatic events. We should all be glad that such exchanges occur, and these presentations seem to mark
355 Though nurture is not simply food, shelter, and learning. Harry Harlow’s primate experiments, in which monkeys preferred the comfort of touching a simulated mother over other stimuli, and in which those who did make the choice of an artificial mother developed quite differently than those who did not, remind us that the comfort of even simple contact can have massive influence on the formation and behavior of adults. Such insights have been further bolstered and rigorously developed by the emergence of attachment theory, of which we will soon have much to say. Donald A. Dewsbury, “Harry Frederich Harlow,” Encyclopedia of Psychology (Washington, DC and Oxford: Oxford University Press and American Psychological Association, 2000), 63. 356 Allen Melvin Russel and Mary Gerhart, “Empathy in Scientific and Religious Understanding,” in Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 306. 357 Russel and Gerhart, 306.
172 precisely the mutuality of recognition that Ricoeur exalts, but we would also likely be disappointed to see such formality and rigidity in our homes at Christmas. While Ricoeur does acknowledge that some gifts mark the relationship more than the value of the gifts themselves, we would suggest that some gifts actually mark the person more than the relationship. That is, if the most a Ricoeurian gift could do would be to mark a particular relationship – of friendship, say, or between lovers – then a generic gift, such as stationery or flowers, could be given by anyone to anyone in that relationship on the appropriate occasion, a reality over which holiday- dependent corporate economies would no doubt rejoice. Such gifts could be chosen and matched almost rationally, by dollar value, and would seem to draw us closer to the economic realm.
We would suggest, however, that another kind of gift is possible, one that does in fact occur: gifts that address particular people as much as occasion or relationship by involving the personalities of the giver and recipient involved. We might call these personalized gifts. As non- generic, such gifts would suit only those involved. Such gifts would recognize specific alterity in a way that Ricoeurian recognition seems not to, and in the giving its agents would become particularly supra-rational actors as their gifts become non-commodifiable. The value of personalized gifts would come from their greater or lesser measure of “sentimental” or emotional worth. This kind of personalized gift exchange would draw us further away from the marketplace. Indeed, it would likely move us even beyond the ceremonial, being more likely to be spontaneous, and would necessarily require not only the recognition, but also the appreciation, knowledge, and understanding of particular persons gained through intimacy. In other words, it would require what Russel and Gerhart summarize as empathy.358
358 Russel and Gerhart, 302.
173 Now, about empathy, there is currently a world of research exploding. We do not wish to get caught up in the furor. Still, it does have bearing on our project: 1) empathy as we understand it seems critical to the mimesis by which we learn a sensibility, a way of seeing and representing the world; 2) empathy certainly registers as precisely that kind of non-verbal knowledge of others that a formative responsivity requires; and 3) the sense of attestation which emerges through a world of others certainly requires that one feels trusted by others, a feat impossible without empathy. As neuroscientist Jerrold Siegel writes:
By about nine months, the infant’s increasingly complex representational capacities allow for the development of an internal image of the parent, which Aitken and Trevarthen call a “virtual other.” This is secondary intersubjectivity, in that now the infant (like the parent since the beginning of the relationship) filters perceptions of the other person through the secondary process of a ‘virtual other’ representation. This intermediate step is the typical way in which the mind connects the memory of past experiences with ongoing perception. (Emphasis mine).359
That is, the bridge by which a mind first connects past events to present reality – the very kind of narrative that a Ricoeurian self requires, as well as the mechanism by which the self attributes actions to itself as “I did that” – has its very origin in an internalized image of a parent. Since this happens so early in an infant’s mental growth, it is difficult to see how this image could form without the very real presence of that parent in the infant’s life –without their resounding, in some sense, with the influence of that parent from the very earliest stages of selfhood. Clearly, this is a vital claim to make for the role of empathy in the development of any kind of sense of self, and thus for this thesis. But even more broadly, the research concerning empathy’s role in the increasingly important first two years of human development has only grown stronger in the last ten years.360 So any who are interested in supplementing or completing Ricoeur’s
359 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 128–29. 360 Siegel, The Developing Mind, x.
174 anthropology would do well to spend some time with empathy. Of course, we would do well to start, as Ricoeur might have done, by surveying a few common definitions.
While we are unaware of any full-length philosophical study of empathy such as Ricoeur has provided for recognition, we do adhere to this more cognitive understanding of empathy as an ability to holistically imagine another’s point of view or worldview. We take this from Russel and Gerhart, who begin their chapter by denying, as we do, that empathy is merely “sympathy, feeling for the other.”361 Later, however, they add, to clarify: “to empathize is to place whatever consciousness one understands the others to have within one’s own.… One has an affective knowledge of the other person.”362 This is a departure from some previous definitions of empathy, such as Hannah Arendt’s,363 which contrasts an affective empathy “as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else” with a more cognitive “considering an issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who stand somewhere else,” in what she calls, along with Kant, “enlarged mentality.”364 Yet it seems odd to us that Arendt would need to divide empathy from imagination at all, as if one could understand another person’s position without imagining also how they might feel, or, indeed, how they might experience or understand their position in the world.
361 Russel and Gerhart, “Empathy in Scientific and Religious Understanding,” 302. 362 Russel and Gerhart, 307. 363 To quote the entire passage that Russel and Gerhart seemingly summarize: “I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual view of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.” Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” accessed March 27, 2020, https://idanlandau.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/arendt-truth-and-politics.pdf. 364 Linda M. G. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33 (February 23, 2005): 175.
175 Empathic imagination is key to our understanding, particularly if we think of understanding holistically, as Russel and Gerhart do. They note that empathic understanding, more than recognition, includes insights that are initially not conscious.365 We have all had the experience of coming to know more about something through imaginative reflection, and that much of our imaginative thought engages images and feelings more than propositions.366 The classical conundrum over whether or not it is possible to truly adopt another’s point of view may be less important for us than whether or not the effort significantly alters our own, and whether it can affect the relationship between self and other.
Imaginatively engaging images and feelings more than propositions should sound familiar to us as students of Ricoeurian metaphor. It is precisely through imagination that the rhetor and auditor enter the same world of meaning, and arrive at an understanding that is not reducible to propositions.367 It would seem, then, that metaphor may make empathy easier, if it has brought rhetor and auditor cognitively closer together, at the same time as it has done so for the two terms of its comparison. Empathy, as a means of understanding that metaphor makes clear, realizes the faculty of imagination.
With empathy as a means of understanding, we can begin to speak of empathy hermeneutically, and of a way to address the relationship between unity and diversity, which has been referred to in classical philosophy as the problem of the one and the many. Perhaps, if we view it as such, we can begin to see the ways in which empathy clarifies the problem of the one
365 Russel and Gerhart, “Empathy in Scientific and Religious Understanding,” 305. 366 Russel and Gerhart, 305. 367 Ricoeur considers a proposition to be a sentence only when, because of a certain construction, it presents a clear and finished meaning. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 57. It is thus clear that Ricoeur does not understand the meaning of a metaphor to be reducible to propositions. Indeed, he might not even consider the object of metaphor to be reducible to propositions. Ricoeur, 257.
176 and the many, which in turn may, by analogy, lead us to potential ways that we might begin to re-conceive the problem of self and other (since both problems grapple with underlying issues of unity and diversity). This is the project of Karl Morrison’s I Am You, which comes as close as any book we know of to being a thorough philosophical investigation of empathy itself. Since we are concerning ourselves with both the genesis of metaphor and the generation of persons, examining empathy’s role in the problem of the one and the many, as Morrison does, seems like it may prove to be a profitable course. Somewhat as Riceour has done with recognition,
Morrison examines the history of empathy as a concept, beginning with the first uses of the signal empathetic phrase, “I am You,” which allows him to go back significantly earlier than the common origin of the word itself in early twentieth century psychology.
Morrison, again like Ricoeur, returns to the Greeks, though instead of the epic, Morrison finds the phrase used in worship, with reference to the gods.368 “I am you” sees its first use in an ecstatic identification with the divine. Later, Christian thinkers take up the phrase and apply it to communion between humans as well as to identification with the divine.369 For the poet John
Donne, “I am you” means taking up the affliction of the dying as a consequence of being united in Christ’s body.370 Thus, “I am you” adds two senses to the concept of empathy: a sense of identification through biology, as in Aristotle’s taxonomic understanding that we are human in that we generate more humans, and a sense in which we participate in something greater as parts of a whole.371 We may think of the former, and especially the latter, as forms of participatory understanding.
368 Karl F. Morrison, I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art, Princeton Legacy Library (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 4. 369 Morrison, 5. 370 Morrison, 5. 371 Morrison, 35.
177 It will serve our argument to note that empathy, as a form of participatory understanding, may also be an emotional fuel for strife, contests, pursuits, and rivalries of every sort – and even of enmities.372 This is important for two reasons. First, because, if we can see empathy in its negative sense, operating in the problem of the one and the many and its resolution in empathetic union, we can begin, perhaps, to see that empathy is a multi-faceted theme of our existence, and not simply a positive feeling to which we might aspire. And second, if we can see empathy as a ubiquitous, if often unacknowledged, fiber of our human experience, then we can begin, perhaps, to see the communion to which empathy attests as a similar fact of human life. And if we can see such communion as a fact of life, empathy becomes not something which we must wish, expect, or imagine, but a way of understanding that we might ourselves understand.
If empathy’s more positive role might sound like love, its more negative role might sound like the conflict that makes understanding possible. We might see this in, for example, biological identification, where the very idea of pairing includes within it the inevitability of conflict – strife that can either be lessened or increased through sexual and other unions, but never entirely resolved. Somewhat analogously, the aesthetic union of artist and art, wherein the artist loses himself in his or her work, comes to fulfillment only through the artist’s struggle to impose form on matter.373 As Morrison writes, “The legacy of the ancient world recognized that strife could be a condition and means of union, and that human bonding could take place through emotions antithetic to love.”374 The conflict of difference operates in the hermeneutic gap where the difference between “reader” and “read” allows the possibility that the “reader” will understand
372 Morrison, 69. 373 Morrison, 89. 374 Morrison, 70.
178 the “read” through contrast.375 Now, we must be very careful of what we take from this notion of empathy in a negative mode, associated mostly with strife and difference.
First, we must be careful because what we might learn from the negative mode of empathy is the ubiquitous fact of empathy in its already extant variations – and not that all of them are either natural or salutary. Empathy is not a force which always needs to be encouraged.
We emphasize in this section, instead, that empathy actually works quite commonly, and often in ways we do not expect. Yet empathy in its negative role does suggest that we may be bound to one another in more ways than we know. And we may still learn something from the empathy that strives, if we do not let the unspoken, modern associations of such words as strife, dominion, and passivity make them mean more than they need to.
A healthy balance of power between persons, after all, may come from a playful wobbling to-and-fro as much, if not more often than, a carefully negotiated and flattened line.376
Yes, the strife between lover and beloved parallels the balance of activity and passivity with that of the strife between art and artist, but a person is not a painting, and there is no reason to expect a lover to not often be beloved, or a beloved not to turn the tables or reverse roles in time.
Rigorously striving with another, even trying to arrest another person’s flight, need not mean contempt and condescension. Though the strife may be profound, one can “capture” another for the purposes of adoration and love – so long as that person remains ultimately free.
Perhaps it is not always despite difference that the self can graciously understand and make room for understanding the other. Rather we submit that it may often be because of
375 Morrison, 40. 376 It may not be too much to say that a date, for example, in which no one takes initiative is not going particularly well.
179 difference that we come to understand one another in the first place. Morrison makes a crucial point when he notes that, historically, it has been possible to understand the many or the one, or for that matter the same and the other, not as two objects opposed across a gap, as we read them now, but as two poles of one sphere being drawn together through contrast.377 This hermeneutical “gap” has often been closed not through deduction, but through association.378 A historical case of this would be the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, who, we recall, focuses less on re-creating the author’s original intent and more on recreating the author’s original experience.379 Now whether or not this effort would ultimately be successful is less important than its means: struggle as a means of associative union.
Other examples of union through struggle would include the victory of artist over art, and even Nietzche being drawn toward Christianity as a theme by his hatred of it.380 Empathy functioning in the negative role, drawing interpreter and interpreted closer together through association rather than similarity, allows us to speak of understanding not through propositions but in terms of plausibility – as the “more, or less likely” language of the possible.381 That is to say: empathy, because it functions both positively and negatively, in the mode of is/is not, allows us to see that the hermeneutical “gap” is itself a metaphor. This in turns allows us to suggest alternative metaphors for understanding the relation of self and other that may more accurately reflect experience. For instance, one can imagine the self and the other not as two selves separated by a boundless chasm, but as two poles of a world-in-relation always and already joined by continents of difference, contrast, and the variable topography of their possible
377 Morrison, I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art, 40. 378 Morrison, 40. 379 Morrison, 40. 380 Morrison, 69. 381 Morrison, 69.
180 relations.
Readers of Ricoeurian metaphor ought to recognize this language, and infer from
Morrison’s point here that metaphor works as well as it does because it engages empathy in both its positive and negative modes. That is, once understood, a metaphor is about an auditor comprehending, in a holistic sense, a world of possibilities glimpsed by an author, but before such understanding occurs the auditor must undergo a struggle to grasp the unseen union between metaphor’s two different terms. The precise relation between the one and the many or the same and the other is, metaphor suggests, less that of antagonists separated by negation and more a distinction separated and joined by both contrast and similitude. Within this cognitive space, the one and the many, or the same and the other, might indeed be more presently near: as
Morrison writes, “understanding means that the possible is made actual through a process of transformation that narrows the distance until it is closed.”382
Because metaphor accomplishes so much of the conceptual work of empathy, it might also present a heightened case of understanding. The function of empathy moving two things – or, more to the point, two people – closer together clearly brings it semantically closer to metaphor. It also suggests that metaphor might be doing more than serving as a heightened case of language. Metaphor makes clear what is more broadly and subtly true of understanding generally: conscious thought and deliberate attention do not lead our cognitive world. Rather, as
Morrison says, “thoughts are digested sensations.”383 Metaphor aims directly for such understanding; “Achilles is a lion” works because it invokes and distills feelings or sensations of fear, admiration, and respect – even awe. Similarly, if we recall our very first chapter, Faulkner’s
382 Morrison, 134. 383 Morrison, 177–78.
181 “my mother is a fish” conveys, in its funereal context, feelings of grief, futility, and dread – and fails if it does not convey these sensations.
These examples of metaphors, then, all seem to be instances of the kind of experiences that Charles Taylor describes in his book The Language Animal, experiences in which one must participate in order to understand.384 Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor as polysemic and alive, as an event which refuses to be reduced to one dictionary definition, has surely put us upon this road of building a cognitive world first based on digested sensations. Surely, his understanding of metaphor does not start one down the path of propositions which first rely on deliberate thought and conscious attention. Metaphor, as Ricoeur understands it, puts the empirical horse of feeling before the cognitive cart of understanding, and this carriage together carries us into an empathetic world. Metaphor would not work were empathy not possible.
What we are suggesting here, what we are saying Ricoeurian metaphor and all our experience has implied, is that it is neither the moral nor the political that is primordial to our understanding, but the empathetic. If so, Ricoeur does not err when he establishes alterity as a condition of possibility for metaphor, testimony, and discourse as a whole – or when he emphasizes the importance of discourse to the consciousness of self. Yet it also would have been no failure if he had been taken his analysis further, and suggested that alterity is a condition of possibility for consciousness itself.
After all, outside Cartesian skepticism, one can hardly claim many sensations which originate solely within the self. Rather sensations are, or seem to be, lingering indications of alterity. They are our first responses to other forces, other objects, other people in the world.
384 Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, 33.
182 Ricoeur writes of this most clearly as a case of active-recognition in Oneself as Another: the self can find assistance or face impediment while acting in the world.385 But he does not there consider the recognition in the passive sense which makes it possible for the self to act at all, and which relies upon others. We might do so, however, if we take up a possible critique of Ricoeur from the Ricoeurian Henry Isaac Venema.
4.6. Empathy fills many of the requirements of being the Derridean trace as a means by which the other influences the self without merger, consumption, or alienation.
Under Venema’s reading of Ricoeur, the only other whom one may possibly “encounter” is itself the product of one’s own cognitive reproduction. As Venema quotes Derrida, “the other is a shore we never reach.”386 Even the other we aim at is found only within our own consciousness or interpretative procedures. Ricoeur tries to overcome this problem through the surplus of meaning in language, in that our intentions don’t entirely determine the meaning of a text, let alone the outcome of an encounter which occurs through living, polysemic language.387
Ricoeur’s attempt to create a bridge to the shore of the other by way of the meaning that our understanding of language produces lays the groundwork for his understanding of the self’s eventual encounter with alterity, which he believes ultimately does takes place. As Venema says
“he is looking for an analogical bridge, a surplus or excess of meaning, to cross the gap between the self and the other.”388 In other words, Ricoeur does not necessarily believe that the other lies
385 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 332. 386 Henry Isaac Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” in Between Suspicion and Empathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 163. Citing John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. Caputo, John D. (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1997), 163. 387 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 181. Citing Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 128. 388 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 174–75. He cites here Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 124–25.
183 beyond all language, but rather that the language we have does not suffice for this purpose. For
Ricoeur, there is a gap of understanding between oneself and another that may be bridged. A text which means more than it says might carry either or both of us across to understanding in one of its many readings. While Ricoeur’s endeavor is laudable, Venema finds himself joining Derrida instead, who, as he summarizes, argues that “the other is a gift which interrupts the economy of such relations.”389 This is indeed a deliberate departure from Ricoeur, for whom one offers a gift before the other or in the presence of the other – the other is never a gift themselves.
Venema notes that such a Ricoeurian hermeneutic may still be considered “an appropriation of what is alien, where what is other must have become my own for me to understand my other.”390 Such an orientation enacts disrespect and violence toward the other as other regardless of one’s own ethical intent.391 Indeed, Venema worries that in sacrificing the real alterity of the other Ricoeur may be asking us to pay “too high a price” to narrow and cross the gap between one’s own consciousness and another who must exceed it.392 Our sacrifice comes about, Venema notes, because Ricoeur, even in the linguistic surplus of meaning, never leaves the world of sense because the surplus is still constructed analogically.393 Consequently, the other in Ricoeur, or the reception of the other, seems less a boon or gift and more the result of a day’s hard labor.394
389 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 175. 390 Venema, 180. Citing Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 113. 391 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 180. 392 Venema, 181. 393 Venema, 181. 394 The difficulty, we understand, is that the other must both be conceived and un-conceived. The ultimate inexplicability of others cannot mean that they exist for us in an abyss of inscrutability: we really can learn information ‘about’ other people that is true and pertinent to them: this is particularly clear in the current age of big data. Likewise, what we do know ‘about’ others cannot ever lead us to think that we have exhausted that particular set of data ‘around’ them, let alone the entirety of their person. The other person must exist for us as both roughly predictable and ultimately surprising, as must oneself.
184 Rather, as Venema reads Derrida our encounter with alterity includes the other not as other but as trace.395 Derrida focuses more on the opening that the other advents and which dislocates the self.396 This produces an acknowledgment or recognition of the other as alter ego, but does not produce the dialectic which includes the other in economic terms, whether that inclusion is asymmetrical or otherwise.397 The trace, as Venema understands Derrida’s postulation of it, seems to be the relation of the other in non-relation – or the impossibility of the other in direct relation.398 The trace is something of an enigma, a metaphor of such philosophical nature that its elucidation would “call upon contradictions.”399 What does seem to be important for the trace, then, is less what it is and more what it accomplishes. The trace’s purpose is to
“call, invent and invite the other to interrupt the language of the Same.”400 But it can only do so
“within the hermeneutics or economic circles of the same.”401 The trace must come into the circles of the Same as “the dream of heterological thought…. It must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens.”402
Because the trace is irreducibly heterogenous, and because the trace of another is in each text, Derrida sees the text as an event that is itself a machine for making events.403 While this understanding of the event may seem to place the trace squarely within the bounds of language – as Riceour might wish – it does not indicate that meaning comes from any interpretation of the text, even the surplus of meaning that polysemy makes possible.404 Indeed, the surplus of
395 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 129. 396 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 184. Citing Jacques Derrida, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Carpenter Lectures (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17. 397 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 124–29. 398 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 129. 399 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 129. 400 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 129. 401 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 186. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 129. 402 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 187. Citing Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 151. 403 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 187. Citing Derrida, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, 92–97. 404 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 187. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 70.
185 meaning in this case does not only surpass one literal definition. Instead, the field of possible meanings of a text is something that itself always changes through the event of reading. One could not, so to speak, read the same text twice – at least, not to come away with the same reading – something that would be possible, it seems, under the Ricoeurian version of polysemy, where the difference between readings lay more in readers and their perspectives than in the event of reading itself.405
The heterogenous trace impacts the text to such an extent that it changes the relationship between the other and the self. As Venema writes, “the other in me is somehow in me as the alterity of the other” that is “forever beyond the grasp of language.”406 This unexpected, possibly unwelcome advent of the other in the midst of the self sounds to us more than a bit like Levinas.
But it is not quite the same, as Levinas still proposes the difference between relation and non- relation as the ultimate gap between the self and the other;407 the trace suggests that, because of its presence within the same’s circles of interpretation, that the gap is in some sense always already bridged even as it remains open. One can easily extend a metaphor too far, to be sure, but surely it matters if we assume that the separation between self and other is more primordial than any possible connection. One thinks fondly of Gadamer, whose fusion of horizons assumes that my own horizon of perception owes relatively little to the other before that joining, and more harshly of Descartes, whose Meditations proceed from knowing the self to knowing the world
405 Citing Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 169, Mark Muldoon writes: “In reading, readers are involved in the dynamic of defamiliarizing and depragmatizing themselves while old orientations toward the subject matter are being broken and re-oriented. This re-orientation, however, is the imaginative aspect of the reading project. Its locus does not lie in some hidden faculty but in the meaning supplied by the reader. Basically, the reader re-orients his or her self through imagination when confronted with gaps in the text (much like the re-orientation of metaphor). “The differences in each reading, then, would be supplied by the reader’s imagination in response to each reading, rather than by differences in the actual readings themselves.” Muldoon, “Reading, Imagination and Interpretation,” 81. 406 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 190. 407 Cohen, “Moral Selfhood,” 131.
186 and God without discerning how to know other people at all. The gap thus becomes so primordial as to be pervasive, and the other so diminished as to register as another object of mental perception. Surely it matters to our thinking about alterity if we are first more connected to others or more essentially isolated from them.408 At the very least, we would have to understand our lack of understanding of this original, familial state, as we do not usually feel
“always and already” connected to most others, no matter our relation to them.
Through the trace, for Derrida, the other does not only inform the self (as it does in
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self), but the other is always already within the self as condition of its very possibility:
The other is in me before me: the ego (even the collective ego) implies alterity as its own condition. There is no ‘I’ that ethically makes room for the other, but rather an ‘I’ that is structured by the alterity within it, an ‘I’ that is itself in a state of self-destruction, of dislocation…. [T]he other is there before me, that comes before [previent] precedes and anticipates me…. I am not a proprietor of my ‘I’. I am not proprietor of the place open to hospitality.409
Venema calls for a Derridean supplement to Ricoeur that goes beyond Ricoeur’s “dialectical hermeneutic” of suspicion and affirmation, oneself and an other, and acting and suffering in time. Dialectics, after all, assume opposition, which is itself already an erosion of the radical difference concomitant to the endurance, indeed the identity, of the other as other, who could also be similar. A “Derridean supplement that respects the impregnable difference of the other” implied by the trace would work – by not working – through kenosis, the emptying out of love for the inviolability of the other. It would do so because “the opening of experience to the other
408 Cohen, 131. 409 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 84–85. As quoted in Venema, “Who Am I to Others?,” 190.
187 is a pre-ethical structure of experience that has already structured me.”410 As Venema quotes
Derrida: “the other is in me before me: the ego implies alterity as its own condition.”411
We submit that empathy fulfills all the criteria of being this trace, this opening, this conditioning structure of me. It is there, in the first months of our lives, before we develop the capacity even to speak. It is the presence, the undeniable influence of another person, in my life before I have much of a life – or a self – to speak of at all. And we find it all too quickly will disappear, no matter how often it returns. Now many – and we hope we have not fallen too far into this trap ourselves – speak of empathy from the active, subjective perspective: empathy means taking on the emotional point of view of another. While this may be true, too much emphasis upon the active aspect of empathy may end up sounding suspiciously like the
Ricoeurian diligence which structured alterity as something like a reward for sacrifice, a non- masterful mastery that is, nonetheless, the product of the self for itself. “Humbling oneself” must not end up being just another day on the job; Ricoeur’s insistence in Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences that “I exchange the me, master of the text, for the self, disciple of the text,”412 we must note, still retains a very active verb and return to the self for its significance, making kenosis itself seem at least somewhat masterful. If the orientation of the self toward the other remains the same in the moment of encountering the other as it does when encountering the text, the self would seem in danger of a somewhat ordinary solipsistic appropriation.413 Thus, hermeneutic kenosis alone may miss the larger philosophical point. As Derrida writes:
410 Venema, “Who Am I To Others?,” 190. Emphasis mine. 411 Venema, 190. 412 Venema, 189. Citing Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” in John B. Thompson, ed. Hermeneutics and the Human sciences, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 113 413 If one thinks with Ricoeur and regards the submission to the other as first and ultimately voluntary, one runs the risk of making the encounter with the other just another experience from which one can learn or benefit, no different from many others; it is not as though this sort of passivity is actually novel in ordinary life.
188 To surrender to the other, and this is the impossible, would amount to giving oneself over in going toward the other, to coming toward the other but without crossing the threshold, and to respecting, to loving even the invisibility that keeps the other inaccessible…. [T]his via negativa does not only constitute a movement or a moment of deprivation [such as Ricoeur’s suspicion within affirmation] an asceticism or a provisional kenosis. The deprivation should remain at work (thus give up work) for the (loved) other to remain the other.414
If we follow Venema’s comments about the trace, as well as Derrida’s remarks about surrender, what would be most true about empathy, and indeed what we have found would be most important and helpful about it, as well as most primordial from a developmental and neurological point of view, would not be the active side of empathy at all. It would be the passive side, what is performed in us when another empathizes with us. It is to the exploration of that passive side of empathy that we now turn.
4.7. Empathy establishes us as selves in a world of others, and does so asymmetrically as we cannot reciprocate it on the level that it first happened for us.
It is the passive sense of empathy that most influences developing consciousness and which researcher Daniel Seigel aptly dubs “feeling felt.”415 “Feeling felt,” the passive experience of empathy, is, simply put, what establishes us in a world of others. The experience of “feeling felt” is manifested both verbally and non-verbally; “facial expression, eye contact, tone of voice, bodily movement and timing of responses” all build the sense that another understands and even shares what one is currently feeling.416 “Feeling felt” speaks to an attunement of states of mind between two people that establishes secure attachments through childhood and beyond.417
414 Jacques Derrida, “Sauf Le Nom,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr, and McLeod, Ian, n.d., 74. 415 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 113. 416 Siegel, 117. 417 Siegel, 91.
189 “Feeling felt” even “facilitates a child accomplishing a task and regulates his emotional state”; later in life, it also encourages group behavior, perhaps even limiting the size of groups, which tend not to grow much larger than the number of people any one member can empathize with.418
“Feeling felt” reaches us in our most intense experiences, amplifying them and revealing our vulnerability: when others reveal that they are not attuned to us during a powerful experience, we often end up feeling profoundly ashamed.419 The sense of rupture in these experiences is telling: the passive experience of empathy shows us that humbling ourselves is not something we need to seek out, for we have been humbly relying upon empathy, mostly unaware, for our entire social lives. We need only understand our own arrogance and ignorance in proceeding as though our dependence on the understanding of others, from the very beginning, was not the case.
The relationship between self and other in empathy seems to be non-dialectical, as being both aligned and non-aligned emotionally do not negate each other, nor do they together form a logical synthesis. Breaks in empathy reveal that we do not and cannot spend our entire lives in undifferentiated emotional fusion with each other. Some breaks in empathy show us that
“attunement requires time when individuals are not in alignment – when they are not directly attempting to match each other’s states…. It includes sensitivity to times when alignment should not occur.”420 So both empathy and breaks from empathy may be part of emotionally healthy
418 Siegel, 176. 419 Siegel, 275. 420 Siegel, 313. Naturally, of course, full and permanent empathy would not only elide the barrier, but also reduce the difference, between persons. But even more practically, one imagines that it does little good for a therapist to empathize with a patient as fully in chance meetings as in session, or for parents to empathize with a child’s feelings of injury caused by discipline, or for lovers to always be furious when their partner is. There are times when resisting empathy is part of nurture and care, which is good because empathy as a phenomenon can be as draining for some as it is nourishing for others, and would be impossible to constantly maintain. Again, we are suggesting that empathy is a fundamental part of all relationship, not all of any relationship.
190 relationships. Curiously, it seems that being in and out of emotional attunement, through time, seems to build a heterogenous respect between self and other.
Thus, the trace which connects – and does not connect – us with others, which inflects us with alterity even as it constructs our consciousness as a conditioning possibility, need not be so profoundly and hypothetically metaphorical as we thought. Like the trace, empathy is “in me before me” because I have been empathized with as a very conditioning possibility of my own self. Empathy is something that we experience – and must have experienced – in order to be a functioning self at all. If I have “felt felt,” another person has left a trace in me that surpasses verbalization, not because of the necessary enormity of the feeling – though that of course can happen – but because the presence of the other generated, through attunement, a vitality that was never merely lexical in the first place. As a trace, empathy is the undeniable presence of another, as an other, within my inmost life.
The heterogeneity of empathy resists both fusion and identification, for, because it relies on the physiology of emotion as much or more than the linguistic and cognitive, one cannot empathize with oneself. In this case, one cannot conjure another body to align with. Thus, “I am
You” both requires another person and resists a “we” as a very condition of its articulation. The formula of “I am You” thus expresses the problem of the one and the many in a unique way, resisting fusion at the same time as it retains unity in diversity. Empathy, then, is, instead of a dialectic in which two opposed terms move nearer to each other, more of a topography which states locations in relation. It announces alterity, ‘You’, as a very founding condition of identity,
‘I’.
Empathy, then, is not a deliberate making room for the other, for there are no actual moments where one says “I am going to become you and feel what you are feeling for a little
191 while.” Rather, it is empathy that, when it comes, structures what we ourselves will say and feel, a frisson of understanding beneath our discourse. Empathy succeeds and fails both with and without – and sometimes, perhaps, in spite of – our intent. It is a free and wild thing. So
Venema’s statement that the trace is in me as the alterity of the other may also mean that it is alterity for the other, a trace that is also other to the other due to its placement in me, beyond the grasp of anyone’s language as soon as it is formed. If so, even the active side of empathy, of being the one to say “I am You,” would have its humbling dislocation, as, instead of making room for the other, one finds that one is not even the sole proprietor of one’s own self to begin with. If “I am You,” is in any way true, we must conceive of the self not as a still point but as an unfolding that affects both others and itself in a thousand ways neither intended nor concluded nor foreseen. We might find it disconcerting indeed to think that this has been the case all along, though of course quite naturally it has.
4.8. Empathy unites our various studies, providing: a means by which the sensibility and skill of metaphor may be transmitted; a phenomenon by which we really do resonate with others before we come into ourselves; the means by which we learn to trust ourselves by trusting others; and a human bond that unites us at a level more primal than antagonism or rationality
Empathy fills in crucial parts of our studies so far. We have found, in our chapter on metaphor, that metaphor’s origins in rhetoric provide us with the image of a student of metaphor gaining the sensibility of a master through imitative play. Empathy, the attunement of mental states through bonds that are often unspoken, provides us with precisely the mechanism by which we gain sensibility. The student understands the master by coming to see the craft and the world in the same way the master does, an achievement that can only be acknowledged, through empathy in return, by the master. This way of learning seems a premier case of empathy at work.
192 We can also see, on another level, empathy working in metaphor itself: one cannot literally understand the association a metaphor makes, but can understand the world it conjures through a kind of participation, entering into its sphere of possibility. Metaphor sounds, then, in some sense like a solicitation of empathy – metaphor is certainly a creation of the possibility of empathy.421
Secondarily, our exploration of Ricoeurian testimony has found much of his account of it to be laudatory. Yet it does not account for how thoroughly we resound with the others in our lives, while empathy describes exactly this occurring: when attuned to the mental states of others, we resonate with what they themselves are thinking and feeling. As testimony, we not only speak on our own behalf, but also speak for others, in ways that are more than verbal. Such a Levinasian testimony would recognize the moral imperative of another to intrude upon our world; it would also account for an identity which is not confined to our own initiative. Such a narrative is needed if we are to be formed at all in response to the presence of others, a phenomenon which many of us know that we experience. We resound with the others in our lives. Empathy describes exactly this occurring: when attuned to the mental states of others, we resonate with what they themselves are thinking and feeling. And if Siegel’s account of our neurobiological development is correct, our resounding has a crucial effect on the formation of our sense of self indeed.
In our third chapter, on attestation, we have found that one’s trust in oneself must be established through others, particularly through discourse, which clearly enough must be addressed to another person. Now, the connection to empathy may not be, in this case, quite as straightforward, but if we consider all that discourse entails, we would be obliged to consider
421 Certainly, it seems that the negation is true: a failed metaphor is, among other things, a failure to either evoke or extend empathy, if not both.
193 that intonation, pacing, and the nonverbal elements of discourse that constitute most ordinary, if not most academic, interaction require empathy in order to function well at all. Failing to understand the broader mental, emotional, and social context of what another person says, as well as their saying it, takes one quite a long way down the road of misunderstanding. Empathy seems to be a conditioning possibility of effective discourse and communication.
More to the direct Ricoeurian point, Siegel’s research indicates that one can only trust oneself once one learns, through experience, what trust is. Long before we trust that our actions are our own, we trust that our cries will elicit attention, food, and care – and we learn which others will respond. Since such cries are instinctual, they can hardly be said to require very much trust in our selves – or, indeed, an individual “self” at all – but they do build our trust in others, our very first case of trust understood as reliable response in the world. And since such responses come wrapped up in empathy, as when a mother and her infant not only exchange smiles, but do so in response to each other’s smiles, it may be said that the first actions one takes are the emotional expressions that link our primordial experiences of hunger, discomfort, and pleasure with the heartfelt response of others. Our most basic trust is not in ourselves, but in other people.
Finally, in this fourth chapter in particular, on recognition, we hope to have shown that while Ricoeurian recognition finally does take us down the road of reliance on alterity that metaphor first opens up, his particular understanding of recognition does not take us quite far enough. Empathy seems to be an excellent example of a robust, multi-faceted form of knowing that requires us to imagine another’s experience robustly and with sophistication, not only cognitively but also at the primal, biological level of emotion and nurture. While the search for recognition no doubt drives much human behavior, we see from Ricoeur’s own example of the gift that, when it comes to recognition, we seem to expect, particularly in intimate and familial
194 circumstances, a good deal more than simple or formal acknowledgement. Pragmatically, empathy also seems required for recognition itself, as political bodies such as Israel and Palestine can and do appeal to empathy, to understanding their world as they experience it, to support their arguments for recognition. Indeed, part of the frustration of many negotiations seems to be the feeling that if one’s position or situation were simply “understood” then the right course of action would often seem immediately clear. Whether or not this feeling is correct, the appeal to empathy and its ties to moral knowledge, particularly, seem to go beyond appeals to “mere emotion.” “Feeling felt” rewrites the inescapable emotional context of both participants. It changes the terms of the encounter.
Venema, we recall, appeals to the Levinasian notion of the trace for a “pre-ethical structure of experience that already structures me.” By fulfilling this role, empathy makes a specific and wholesale change to our conception of alterity. We must reconsider, in effect, whether the “gap” between self and other that Ricoeur is always trying to cross exists in a primordial sense at all. If empathy is true, if it has the stake in our development that Siegel thinks it does, then that sense of disconnect, of radical incomprehension bridged by mostly verbal structures of mutual understanding, does not seem original at all. Rather, the first thing we experience would be our being understood, our caregivers knowing what we are feeling and returning that to us while seeing to our wants and needs – often without using words at all. While this would happen in an ideal scenario, it must have occurred often enough for us to be alive, and a little more often for us to be competent adults.
The gap between self and other, then, would have to have been something that had grown, biographically, as we endured the separations and antagonisms of maturing in the world and, philosophically, as we progressed from Augustine’s scriptural image of “abyss speaking to
195 abyss” to Descartes’ enduring image of a brain trapped in a vat, deceived by a mendacious devil.
For such radical isolationism, natural to us as it may seem, to have developed in our humanity rather than been original to it changes our presumptions about what reconnection we might be able to accomplish. It also makes us more responsible for the disconnects that have occurred.
Empathy was once possible for very nearly everyone. For us to be fundamentally unable to understand another person at all is not a brutal existential reality, but rather a scathing indictment of a social incapacity.
Understanding empathy should also relieve us of some of the anxiety about being such isolated or “buffered” selves.422 Both our successes and failures of empathy are demonstrably mundane, humble affairs, open to interrogation and to change. Aside from the obvious empathy required to successfully raise a child – or successfully become an adult – empathy has much more workaday roots. The simple practice of putting people in the same room synchronizes their breathing, and they begin to mirror one another’s postures, tone, and gestures. Guests around a dinner table find themselves eating and drinking at the same times. Such behavioral minutiae fill our days, and are sparked by the “mirror” neurons that create the low hum of human connection that crescendos in moments of the real, mutual, and multi-faceted understanding that we call empathy. And this does not even begin to touch on the therapeutic level, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, among other people, teach empathy by practicing it. Conversely, the deep alienation and isolation that some of us may feel has, according to Siegel, very traceable roots in our first few years of life, positing a susceptibility to both trauma and anxiety that therapy can address. Our brains are, Siegel emphatically notes,
422 Charles Taylor, “Buffered and Porous Selves,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), September 2, 2008, https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/.
196 plastic, and amenable to change. Empathy, being our native emotional state, is something we can indeed return to. It ought to require no miracles, but rather, mostly, the simple work of our knowledge, our attention, and our patience.423
Ricoeur, we recall, starts us down this very road. Recognition shows us a response to alterity that is not, necessarily, anxious. His survey of recognition’s definitions ends with those that, at least in the original French, connote gratitude. And gratefulness would indeed be a natural and fitting response to a suitable and well-intended gift. But if we recall that particularly thoughtful gifts seem to provide more than recognition, we might also ask if they solicit more than gratitude, or at least gratitude of a somewhat different kind. For with recognition, we seem to be primarily grateful to others for a gift. Gifts that demonstrate empathy, however, give more than any object. They prove that another person understands what we feel and see because, at least in part, they feel and see it too. They prove that our inner worlds are real, reliable, and matter outside of us. By doing so, in some sense, they give to us our selves. They present philosophy the puzzling possibility that the elements of the gift – giver, given, and gift – are changed when we ourselves are the gift. At the same time, the empathy that such gifts demonstrate anchors another person in place and time: we are glad that they, too, are feeling what we feel and see: they are also gifts to us in and of themselves. So one can imagine empathy
423 Likewise, we should not worry that empathy would or could end all conflict around the world. Not only does heterogeneity require times of non-empathy and separation if it is to function, empathy, as Morrison reminds us, does not only include joyous union but also the passionate attunement of strife and antagonism. Worse, empathy can, like other human capacities, be twisted. It takes on a very horrifying tinge indeed if we recall the pathology of sadists, who enjoy feeling their victim’s pain, or even those who simply use empathy to manipulate others to their own selfish ends. When we say that empathy is primordial, we are not speaking to the necessary health and salutary effect of that connection, but only that the bond exists, and is perhaps more easily twisted than it is broken.
197 engendering a double gratitude: we end up being grateful to others for ourselves, and also grateful for others themselves as particular, real others in the world and in our consciousness.424
So, much as Ricoeur did with his definitions of recognition, we seem to have found that our definitions of empathy have shifted from the epistemic to the moral realm. We started out seeking empathy as a more rigorous means of knowing, but seem to have ended understanding empathy as a more rigorous means of being known. Such passive means of being known have not been much studied by philosophy historically, but have been of interest to psychology and the development of persons and societies.425 For as we saw above, empathy is fundamentally about a sense of being-with. That is what the most personal gifts demonstrate. If others can return our feelings, it shows that both self and other inhabit the same physical and mental worlds.
It proves that we are together, even as we are irreducible. It shows us that we belong.
` A metaphor is an invitation to empathy – and, as such, an invitation to belong. This, perhaps, is the deepest resonance of Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor. Like empathy, metaphor lives at the edges of language, at the bounds of what words can express about ourselves and about the world. Just as people rely on a host of physical and verbal expressions to convey what feelings they are sharing, metaphor relies on a host of logical and associative
424 If we come to understand empathy, we may clarify a relation occluded in much philosophy. The Enlightened West treats alterity primarily as adults deal with it. Hobbes’s portrait of violence mitigated by rational accord is without doubt a compelling understanding of the adult political world. Such alterity is indeed adversarial and oppositional, and one certainly cannot understand the affairs of nations without it. Yet not so is all alterity. Children, as they are cared for, encounter a different kind of alterity altogether – or at least we hope they do, or we make serious criticism of the family. The alterity that children experience in their parents is manifestly supportive, and by its very nature this seems to be the alterity that impacts us the most during our most formative years. So why should adversarial alterity take precedence over nurture in our consciousness, even in our most basic understandings of difference? While we ought not to overstate the importance of empathic, familial alterity as some sort of counter- balance, we can certainly find the distinction between these forms of alterity useful in thinking about alterity generally and in analyzing specific encounters with other people. We need not let a conflation between the two leave us more anxious than we need to be. 425 And certainly it is of interest to the sciences now.
198 meanings to propose a way of seeing a relation between two things. Indeed, it proposes a world in which the association between those two things is indeed the case. “My mother is a fish.” This is metaphor’s purpose as rhetoric: to say the comparison aloud, and to invite another to see things the same way – and ultimately to feel similarly about these things.
For if metaphors are invitations to belong, it is certainly true that all language will eventually produce them; it is difficult, after all, to imagine any use of language that does not seek to bring us together with at least some other persons, even if our language might very much alienate others. So we see that in seeking metaphor’s origins along a Ricoeurian line, we may have found one of its purposes. And if we have, Ricoeur’s more contested claim that all language is originally metaphor, whether or not correct, will have somewhat missed the point of his own discovery. After all, if there is anything more ubiquitous than the struggle for recognition, it would have to be the human yearning to belong, for good or ill. But belonging will be the subject of our final chapter.
199 CHAPTER FIVE:
THE FRAME OF BELONGING
5.1. Differing conceptions of grief and mourning in Eastern philosophies reveal a self that is constructed through an inescapable society, rather than in a frame of essential isolation. One of the difficulties of seeing our way out of a version of Cartesian subjectivity, no matter how helpfully re-framed, is that so many of our assumptions about the self, and about thinking about the world more broadly, are themselves individualist, epistemic, and even solipsistic, simply by cultural default. It is thus naturally difficult for many of us in the West to even imagine possible alternatives to an epistemic world that focuses on the individual human subject. Toward this end, we turn to the work of philosopher Amy Olberding, who specializes in early Chinese philosophy.
Olberding relates the story of when the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu is found singing after his wife’s death.426 His friend Hui Tzu, who finds him, is appalled, and requires an explanation. Chuang Tzu replies that his wife both entered and left the world through change, and concludes: “if I follow her weeping and sobbing, I would show that I do not understand the conditions of things (ming); so I stopped.”427 As a way of explaining the story, Chuang Tzu also tells the story of Confucius finding pigs suckling their dead mother until they realize she is no longer the same.428 This too is a recognition of ming, the shifting, contextual conditions of reality. As Chuang Tzu laments: “the thing which is basic no longer exists.”429 What such
426 Amy Olberding, “Mourning, Memory, and Identity: A Comparitive Chapter of the Constitution of the Self in Grief,” International Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1997): 38. 427 Olberding, 38. 428 Olberding, 39. 429 Olberding, 39.
200 massive disruption entails is, in fact, further change. Chuang Tzu needs to move away from his identity as husband to his wife and move toward, perhaps, his identity as friend to Hui Tzu.430
Their very philosophical disagreements, as exemplified in the initial challenge, begin to restore
Chuang Tzu – even if this is not, perhaps, Hui Tzu’s intent. Because Chuang Tzu recognizes that in some sense he, Chuang Tzu, husband, does follow his wife in death, he, Chang Tzu, friend, is able to follow Hui Tzu back into the world.
It may be difficult for Westerners to understand this story precisely as the Chinese do. In play are not only different conceptions of grief and mourning, which Chinese people formally separate in a way that Westerners often do not, but also fundamental assumptions about the self.431 As Olberding observes, grief in the West is understood as loss – that is, a loss of an object undergone by the “individual, autonomously centered ‘I’.” For example, the philosopher
Edmund Burke “describes grief as the privation of ‘pleasure’ and as a ‘passion’ which is wholly negative.”432 Previously, subject and object had held a relationship based upon “a foundation of empathetic recognition of otherness.”433Olberding elaborates: “the liminal nature of the self is implicit in the contractual, or built, relation. There is a border between individuals, and recognizing the alterity of the other is part of the relation.”434 When that relation is broken by death, a more basic reality is exposed: “a fundamental liminal awareness which undergirds and reinforces an ultimate isolation of subject and holds the other as object.”435 As Derrida notes, we
430 Olberding, 39–40. 431 Olberding, 29. 432 Olberding, 31. 433 Olberding, 31. 434 Olberding, 31. 435 Olberding, 32. While there have of course been a whole history of attempts in the West to go beyond the subject/object divide (notably for our purposes Husserl’s enfolding of the object within the very composition of the subject’s skein of perception), Olberding would doubtless say – and we would agree – that in death the truth will out, and the fundamental changes of assumption required to move away from a subject/object divide have not yet occurred for most Western people.
201 all die alone – and for those of us who mourn the dead, the only thing we cannot remember them as is as they were: themselves. We remember by our own inclination, rather than by the nature of the mourned. Death is the ultimate separation of subject and object in the West. Death is dispossession.436
The Chinese seem to understand these fundamental notions of the self quite differently.
“The Chinese paradigm of self does not simply make relations,” writes Olberding, “it is made by them.”437 Indeed, in order to describe the self one must revert to describing relations with others, as well as the others therein. Framed this way, the self is centered situationally rather than autonomously. It is defined by relationship rather than by some core nature. Yet even the
Chinese notion of relationship is different than the Western one. We in the West tend to abstract relations from their concreteness: we can talk about friendship, for example, in a way separated from any particular participants, precisely because we understand friendship as constructed, rather than essential. Two friends are both “themselves” without it, unique just as they are: alone.
Such uniqueness in isolation is not the case for the Chinese, whose very identity comes through the concrete patterns-in-relation by which persons distinguish themselves and one another. Relationships are, indeed, “that which makes persons distinct and significant.”438 Thus, the specific, unique concreteness of that relation matters: “the particularity and details of the relation constitute the particularity and details of the self it forms.”439 A relation, then, is not a constructed communion bridging two autonomous selves. Rather, a relation is the “fabric” from which the self is cut. Notes Olberding: “like uncut fabric, the self described exclusive of its
436 Olberding, 31. 437 Olberding, 33. 438 Olberding, 33. 439 Olberding, 34.
202 constitutive relational and situtational elements is a garment without shape or the stitches necessary to hold it together.”440
A crude way of summarizing the difference between Chinese and Western conceptions of the self, then, may be to say that in the West we assume the self and construct the relation, but that the Chinese assume the relation and build the self. These patterns work themselves out in the ways that Chinese and Westerners grieve and mourn. For Westerners, the goal often seems to be a return to the self and to normal life as quickly as possible, albeit perhaps to a changed version of both. Yet for the Chinese, the goal of bereavement seems to be precisely a “shifting” of understanding and of self through a formal recognition of the dead. The goal is the change from grief to mourning in a new understanding of altered ming. The transition in awareness from grief to mourning is evident in the extended Confucian tradition of mourning a dead parent for three years, keeping the household in the same order as the parent did – in order to remember one’s own three-year period of maximal vulnerability and dependency upon them, and memorialize the care that they bestowed.441
If bereavement in the West is understood as loss, it seems to be understood among the
Chinese as a kind of death. In grief’s fullest expression, one becomes uncertain of who one is, because one’s relations in the world have changed. One in fact has died, in more than one sense.
One of the things that Confucius laments upon the death of his pupil Yen Hui is the version of himself that Yen Hui would have remembered. The Confucius that would have been preserved in his student’s memories had also been slain. Thus, with the death of his student, his own life has been cut short.442 A similar ethos is evident in another story about Confucius who, confused,
440 Olberding, 34. 441 Olberding, 43. 442 Olberding, 43.
203 asked “Am I doing so?” when his students protested that he was mourning his dead wife
“without restraint.”443
The Chinese and Western conceptions of the self seem to be significantly different. But wherein lies the truth? A Ricoeurian response, perhaps, would be to say that we ought to maintain a balance in our understanding, because there are surely some things about selves that are constructed, and some things about relations that are inviolable, and other things about selves that are inescapable, and some things about relations that do rely on cooperative endeavor. It seems unlikely that no Chinese people have felt the sting of personal loss when their beloved has died, just as it seems unlikely that all Westerners remain certain and secure of their identity when their parents or children or spouses die. These phenomena must hold even if our respective cultures seldom formally acknowledge them. We do remember the theological and aesthetic trope of “I am You,” perhaps best exemplified in Donne’s “no man is an island.”444 Such deep empathy would seem to surpass that constructed in friendship or negotiated via contract. Indeed, it would seem difficult to will such co-involvement, and far easier simply to recognize it as always and already existing all around us. The West seems to have done so from time to time, though perhaps not institutionally, and perhaps not much in philosophy.
Philosophically, we in the West seem to have faced surprising difficulty in conceiving of the self as anything other than a self essentially separate from, if not in fact isolated from, both others and the world around it, the qualities of which are often in dispute.445 We will call this
443 Olberding, 30. 444 John Donne, “No Man Is An Island” (Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions), accessed November 6, 2018, https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html. 445 That is, it has been difficult to conceive of them differently to the extent that we have wanted to. Some of course have wanted to, very notably so in the case of Charles Taylor, whose critical image of the “buffered” self we are deeply indebted to. We only hope that our liminal framework includes, from the very beginning, a critique that is even broader, emphasizing its extension to the other and the world as well.
204 understanding of self the liminal frame, as such a conceptual scheme serves as a framework for other thoughts, and our current frame relies on clear boundaries between oneself, another, and the world. Moreover, not only are self, world and other all separate entities, keeping that separation, maintaining the boundaries in balance, becomes cognitive part and parcel of maintaining a healthy understanding of oneself and others. Within the liminal frame, the best one can conceivably do is to do as Ricoeur has done, and develop a chastened capability of self, the most carefully calibrated balance between passivity and activity, between service and mastery.
And that balance is a narrow one indeed: on one side, if we overly emphasize our passivity before others and to external circumstance, we may puncture our sense of self, risking disempowerment and the victimhood that denies responsibility. Yet if we bolster our self’s sense of capability excessively, we at best accuse those who fail to achieve, and at worst implicitly condone the erasure of others through megalomania and atrocity.
Can there truly be no better alternative to this egoistic tightrope? At first it seems that the answer must be no. The philosophical turns that lead us to this point, beginning with Augustine’s soulful reflections of abyss calling to abyss446 and ending with Cartesian isolation,447 seem as ineluctable as does Ricoeur’s argument in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another seems difficult to correct. In and of themselves, the assertions are not mistaken, and the conclusions follow from their premises. Of course we are the stories we tell about ourselves and the things we have seen and done and said in the world, and what has been done and said to us. What else
446 Augustine, “Exposition on the Psalms,” Religious Organization, New Advent, accessed March 29, 2020, 42: 12, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801042.htm. 447 Such Cartesian isolation is perhaps most clearly encapsulated in this brief quote from Charles Taylor: “What Descartes does very much retain of Stoic and neo-Stoic thought is the norm of detachment. Reason tells us what is for the best, and we act to bring it about. But all the while, we are fully detached from the outcome…. Not conflict- free harmony, but struggled-for domination is now the acme of virtue, and the joy which flows from this is the satisfaction at the victory of reason.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 132–33.
205 could we be? Liminal self, alien other, and contested world all work to compose a frame that
Western philosophy cannot escape, and other arrangements of these elements within the frame than that which Ricoeur describes simply seem much worse. But our own studies have been leading us in an altogether different direction, one that might offer a way through the problem of the Western self’s alienation from alterity.
5.2. Our four studies reveal an essentially social self that gains capacities through imitation, resounds with inter-personal influence, relies on nurture to establish trust, and depends on empathetic understanding throughout its lifetime.
We hope that our brief encounter with Chuang Tzu shows that there are other possibilities than liminality for considering the self. We need not consider ourselves to be selves facing others across a gap of strangeness, forced to choose between solicitude and hostility. We might instead be, if we consider just the Chinese example, the unique and unrepeatable intersection of our friends and parents, of our associates and our romantic partners, all of whom offer more resources – and more options – for being ourselves than we alone can provide. And we hope that we have shown in the course of our studies that our experiences of metaphor, imitation, childhood and empathy should lead us to be open to learning from other philosophical anthropologies and their frames, even if it remains clear that we cannot and probably should not embrace every alternative account wholesale.
As we have seen from our very first chapter, even our metaphors speak to inescapable, fundamental social ties. A participatory art, metaphor implicitly requires other people, and it is not always clear who beckons to whom. Does the rhetor cajole the crowd? Or does the audience summon the speech, and therefore the speaker? Or, once again, is the poet simply sent from the
206 school that taught her? By providing a dialogical, artisanal model of metaphor, Ricoeur’s The
Rule of Metaphor provokes these kinds of questions, even if it does not explicitly ask them. And our inability to conclusively select any one answer to them, as evidenced in the Western progression through modernist, reader-response, post-colonial, and deconstructive theories of reading, may speak less to the limitations of our thought and more to the charmed entanglements that give us the power to write and speak in the first place.448 Inescapably, we learn our first words from other people. How could we not learn our first selves and our first worlds from them as well? Indeed, how could others ever prevent that shaping without doing substantial harm?
We do learn more than words from others. Buried in the notion of metaphor as techne, as a craft that can and must be learned by imitating more skilled masters, is the notion of learning a certain sensibility, a particular perspective of sight and imagination that shapes not only how and what one crafts, but also what one sees – and does not see – in the world, and what importance one allots particular findings. It is from this sensibility, shared by master and apprentice alike, that one produces craft. The process is as true for rhetors as it is for visual artists. The fact that mimesis thus implies a shared mind informs, but does not diminish, the artist’s singular ingenuity. T.S. Eliot will always be the visionary student of Ezra Pound. Allen Ginsburg’s radical verse is inextricably inflected with the cadence of Walt Whitman and the mythic vision of
William Blake. Other examples abound, notably so in the history of philosophy. The bonds between apprentice and master, student and teacher, admirer and admired, do not stop at the level of language but flow as a current that certainly produces many words – as well as other artifacts.
448 Modernist theories place the burden upon the Great Author to persuade, imagine, and compel; reader-response theories have the Reader create the text when they read; post-modern and deconstructive theories have the authors speaking, even despite themselves, on behalf of the hegemonies that have privileged them to write. Riceour’s understanding of metaphor, by focusing on the event itself, is at the very least interesting in that it does not try to privilege any one of reading’s participants.
207 Such bonds, beyond language, belie a relation akin to that described by Emmanuel
Levinas in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, which describe an approach to selfhood that is not epistemic in the Cartesian sense. It is not about knowing the self at all, but is instead ethical, an anthropology inspired by both Jewish and Christian writing.449 Thus Levinas eliminates a self that is doomed to appropriate or extinguish others in a perpetual search for understanding, control, and satisfaction. Replacing it is a self that is repeatedly jolted off-balance and forced to respond to the face of the other that insists “Thou shalt not kill.”450 Such moments interrupt our self-centeredness and insist on our response, the quality of which describes our humanity.
So constituted, we resound to the insistent call of others. We are bells rung. While artistic sensibility is not ethical in this Levinasian sense, it is clearly possible to talk about mimetic imagination in much the same way: poets resound with the metaphors of those who have gone before them, just as sculptors and painters attune to the vision of past masters. But the implications of mimicry transcend the creative arts. Children, too, resound with the language of their parents – reverberating as well with their gestures, postures, moods, character and pathologies. Indeed, such resonance becomes a crucial form of children’s growth and development. This mirrors another of Levinas’s claims: that it is not we who respond to others so much as it is we who are our response to others, in ways that include, but also transcend, the bounds of language and overt communication.
449 Though Levinas’s conclusions are not necessarily religious, and neither is his use of Torah evidence of religious belief, there is no doubt that those documents, as well as The Brothers Karamazov from which he quotes so frequently, are themselves substantially religious documents, invoking a religious sense of oneself, others, and the world. Levinas might be said to draw water from the well of religion, though he does not himself jump in and swim. 450 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh. PA: Dusquesne University Press, 1985), 87.
208 Such a Levinasian anthropology need not run afoul of the Ricoeurian narrativity described in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another, so long as we address a question of priority. Ricoeur’s notion of a narrative self, with the narrative imitating events in the world, and then with one’s own life imitating the plot of the story that one tells oneself, makes great sense of an experience of an adult seeking rational coherence in time. Levinas’s implied notion of a self that becomes true largely through the interruptions and interrogations of others seems, on the other hand, to make rather good explication of our more developmental years, of children growing into themselves in a world signed overwhelmingly by others.451
Would it not be possible, then, to think of the passivity beyond passivity of the self that
Levinas largely implies as establishing the conditions of possibility for the non-masterful capability of the self that Ricoeur offers outright? It may be that Ricoeur and Levinas sound so different precisely because they are, perhaps unawares, talking about such different things. If selves are bells rung by other people, Levinas would have been talking about being struck.
Ricoeur, on the other hand, might have been rather talking about the sound. It may well make sense to think of Levinas and Ricoeur in a particular, causal sequence when they talk about the self. Saying this does not remove all the wrinkles between their positions, but does indicate that such difficulties may be understood across the complexities of the dynamic relation of childhood to adulthood within the life of the self, which remains a subject open to fruitful investigation.
A conditioned, reliant, dynamic self would not seem to run afoul of a strand of
Ricoeurian thought that is broader and perhaps more significant than the narrated self: his analysis of discourse. In Ricoeurian discourse, someone says something to someone about
209 something else. Explicitly, discourse requires the presence and contribution of others. None of its terms can be removed without nullifying its essence. This is abundantly clear in Ricoeur’s first exploration of discourse, metaphor, where a metaphor’s polysemy, its very availability to others for reiterative re-understanding, is as essential to its definition as the intent of the metaphor’s author that its comparison not be taken literally by its audience. Without a meeting between a rhetor’s broadest address toward other people and an audience’s vitalizing understanding, a metaphor cannot be. Informed by Ricoeur’s awareness of discourse as a kind of dialogue, metaphor as a structured event perhaps sounds closer to supporting a Levinasian account of selfhood than it does the one that Ricoeur himself imagines when he considers narrative. This is because Ricoeurian narrative is more monological, allowing for oneself to be incorporated into the stories of others, but not dependent upon or following from them in the way that dialogue does.452
Ricoeur’s development of a particular concept of attestation implies, but does not emphasize, a self that develops from and through and by discourse with other people. Ricoeur does eventually arrive at the conclusion that attestation – that is, trust – must be worked out in a world of others and before others. But this is attestation only in a secondary sense; the primary sense for Ricoeur seems to be that trust is first trust of one’s own self. But our biology does not lead us to consider such self-trust to be primary. In fact, our biology leads us to expect the reverse, as our first and most primordial notions of reliability involve the solicitous, empathetic
452 It is interesting to note that, in his descriptions of what constitutes a story, Ricoeur always includes plot and character, but never mentions dialogue. Many writers of fiction would perhaps find this puzzling – even if dialogue is simply the revelation of character and plot, it may not make sense to avoid mentioning it, especially since it can be argued that plot, for the purposes of literature, is also simply the revelation of character. The most significant elements of fiction might all merit their own mention. In any case, if Ricoeur understands metaphor as a highly cooperative venture, he conceives of narrative as much more solipsistic, though he later attempts to explore collective memory and, by implication, collective narrative in Memory, History, Forgetting.
210 responses of those who care for us. Infant studies seem to imply that we come to trust, for example, that our mother will smile in reply to us before we trust that our smiles are our own, or, indeed, have any proper notion of our self at all.453 It may even be that our dependence on others is precisely how we come to understand ourselves as selves capable of acting and speaking in the world, selves whose actions have particular effects. We see other people acting in certain ways, and come to think we may do the same – indeed, we may come to think that to be a “self” is precisely to be one who acts in these ways. “We” are like “them.”
Because these primordial, biological responses that are built into empathetic relationships seem to form the way in which we come to construct a self, the recognition that Ricoeur writes about in The Course of Recognition seems insufficient for our becoming selves. Our parents, at least, must not only recognize that we were worthy of respect and dignity, but they must also provide care, love, and deep wells of attention, appreciation, and imagination for our nurture.
Some of the moments most vital for our formation come not only when we are provided for but also when we are “feeling felt” – when our parents, often our mothers, demonstrate to us through their words, demeanor, and actions that what we feel inside – our emotional worlds – are real, important and understood – even shared.454 Over time, patterns of such moments build our sense of self, crucial to those very capable selves that we eventually become.455 And if those early patterns of attachment go awry, empathetic relationships that we later embrace, even in adulthood, can do much to restore us to ourselves and expand our possibilities, even so many years later.456
453 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 128–29. 454 Siegel, 175–76. 455 Siegel, 203–5. 456 Siegel, 376–77.
211 Empathetic relationships of every kind seem vital to the self’s understanding of itself – and thus incorporate alterity at a level fundamental to the construction of that same self.
Considering their importance, then, allows us to unite several minor but persistent themes in
Western philosophy. Aristotelian friendship always requires mimesis, imitation, in ways that transcend words and behavior in order to mimic disposition and character – implicitly requiring friends to imagine themselves in one another’s position, in order to take action for the same reasons that their admired friends would take it. There is, surely, a frisson of empathy required to make such imitation possible. Empathy provides the mechanism by which mimesis can occur, even the mimesis required for the techne with which we began our journey.
In short, empathy allows us to consider ourselves and others not as necessary objects to be tolerated or confronted, but as opposite poles of a cosmos striving for a union despite – and through – the complexities and vastness of the terrain between them. The image of poles striving for union comes from the way aesthetics has reconfigured the relation of the one and the many to assume inescapable relation. But the application of the topographic image of the one and the many to the problem of self and other may be grounded in the sometimes tectonic relations of lover and beloved, or in the fraught relation of artists to their art. Just as not all difference is animosity, so also does not all strife spring from acrimony or a gulf of difference. A tradition, a society, indeed a self might be understood instead through the relationships of which they are composed, for good or ill. In other words, empathy allows us to glimpse, at last, our destination – and that destination is belonging.
5.3. We propose a frame of belonging in which we become ourselves with, by, and through other persons – even as we acknowledge the deep vulnerability that such a frame entails.
212 Considering empathy philosophically leads us to consider a world beyond the liminal frame that necessarily separates self, other, and world in their primordial state. For if empathy has the sort of importance that contemporary science suggests it does, then we truly are all involved, not only in each other’s worlds, but in each other’s very selves, from the very beginning of our existence. Our essential state, as individuals, is in relation. Yes, the depth of this relation and involvement may vary, as in the case of family having more of a stake in my identity than friends, and romantic partners wielding more influence than casual acquaintances or persons just met. Such variation would in fact be one element of a frame in which we first belong. A frame of belonging might force us to recognize that we are all, on some primordial level, always already together – and implores us to construct a philosophical frame in which this makes sense.
Thinking of the example of Chuang Tzu – and the course of our own studies – we might, perhaps, as a starting point, imagine the other as, like a parent, already invested in the change and growth of the self. We suggest parent not because all others should or could have the depth or quality of influence over us that parents do, but because it is the most obvious relation which has, like our relation with one another, an involuntary and inextricable origin. We can never be un-parented. This asymmetry may be one plank of a frame that is something other than liminal.
Within the liminal frame, we first consider the other a stranger – an unknown, potentially threatening figure with whom we must bargain, if we are to think like Hobbes, or with whom we might hazard a friendship, if we think like Aristotle and Ricoeur. Yet if we frame the other as a parent rather than as a stranger or friend, we may come to acknowledge our encounters with
213 other people as formative experiences that cannot be revoked, involving us in relations we can either nourish or starve, but which we ignore at our peril.457
If we can manage to step outside the liminal frame, we can begin to imagine an understanding in which, as our studies suggest, I become myself with, by, and through other persons. Not only are we not essentially separate from others, we are not yet ourselves, and rely on empathy, and the care of other people, to become who we are. This would simply be one possible change of thinking outside the liminal frame in the West, in which the best understanding of the self we can have is Ricoeur’s, in which we are first strangers to ourselves, and are thus open to solicitude. Yet knowing what we have learned in the course of our studies, we may even hope for a better understanding.
To insist that we first belong is, of course, to immediately encounter a few problems of our own. The first is the reality of the difficulty that many persons do routinely find in connecting to others, as well as the very real reasons for such difficulty. Strangers, for example, really are mysterious to us. We know little about them by definition. There are greater difficulties, too. Why should we assume belonging as essential, when primordial estrangement in the Hobbesian sense has such great explanatory power? If we first belong, we would seem to have considerable difficulty accounting for murder, warfare, rape, and all the other kinds of mayhem that human beings regularly inflict upon one another.
We must remember that our understanding of empathy ensures that we can at least begin to understand such horrors. Empathy can include animosity, even enmity. Fraught rivalries show
457 Naturally there are alternative metaphors for persons than parent, just as there are alternative metaphors for the other. Within a frame of belonging, there will naturally be different metaphors to register the varying depths of our belonging.
214 us that empathetic relations can turn quite bitter indeed. Striving for union or harmony can fail; empathy can even propel us toward violence, as the work of Rene Girard reminds us.458 In the extreme, empathetic relations must even be dissolved – with the caveat, of course, that the relation in some sense endures, as we recognize when we refer to romantic partners as our
“exes.” Though we may deny our liasons, we can never undo such relations, any more than we might reverse our childhoods or revoke our ancestry. If Levinas implies, metaphorically, that we are bells rung by others, and if Ricoeur describes the sound that results, it seems unlikely that either would think we might be unstruck. To encounter someone is, always and already, by definition, to know something about them and be in some relationship with them, just as it is inescapably true that some aspects of that person will never be known. Even if our knowledge of another person must later be revised, few outside of science-fiction have ever suggested that it might be entirely undone. For good or ill, we cannot unmeet anyone.
The reality of negative outcomes in empathetic belonging speaks to a second possible objection to considering oneself with, by, and through other persons. If we are so dependent, we may be abused. If our philosophy steps outside the liminal frame which regards the self as essentially separate from the world and from others, we may encourage or condone abuse by refusing boundaries to victims who need them to maintain a sense of self at all. We would aver, of course, that such abuse occurs regularly, despite the liminal frame we already have. And
458 “Mimetic rivalry is the common denominator, in my opinion, of what happens in season festivals, of the so-called ordeal undergone by the initiates in many initiation rituals, as well as of the social breakdown that may follow the death of the sacred king or accompany his enthronement and rejuvenation rituals. The violent demonstrations triggered in many communities by the death of a member must also be interpreted as mimetic rivalry….We found earlier that mimetic rivalry tends toward reciprocity. The model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other’s path a more and more irritating obstacle and each tries to remove this obstacle more and more forcefully. Violence is thus generated. Violence is not originary; it is a product of mimetic rivalry.” Rene Girard, “An Overview of the Mimetic Theory,” in The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000), 10–11, http://www.ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_9243.pdf.
215 again, to offer a frame of belonging is not to propose a change of action or even of culture, but is instead to suggest a possible rearrangement in which our thinking may occur. Consider, for example, a most positive encounter within the liminal frame. I may decide to be solicitous, and in hospitality invite a traveler into my home. In doing so, I graciously make myself vulnerable, and risk conflict and even injury, even though, when I make the invitation, I often wager that a positive outcome is more likely. This making room for the other is what it means to be hospitable.
While a frame of belonging would not purport to reduce violations of that vulnerability, it might allow us to better understand the depth of their harm. Vulnerability is in the nature of belonging, and we, by nature, belong. A frame of belonging would suggest that the gesture of hospitality is simply a recognition of the vulnerability that we both already share. All persons require food and warmth, shelter and kinship to live. All persons rely on other people to help procure these things. We are social creatures. Within a framework of belonging, we can decide how much vulnerability we are willing to accept, but not whether or not we are vulnerable at all.
It is precisely by rending the social fabric that violence and abuse strike us to the intimate cores of our identities. Within the frame of belonging, violence and abuse of every kind are
“parenting” gone wrong, blows that cannot be undone. This remains true even if, over time, we may perhaps quiet their reverberations in our lives.
A third, and much more far-reaching objection, is that there are relationships to which we would not wish to belong. Indeed, there are those relationships which are so extremely destructive or cruel that we are in fact morally obliged to refuse them – yet we would seem to be incapable of doing so, if we are bound so fundamentally to our social origins. This, of course, is the controversy with which Ricoeur himself contends as he responds to the Gadamer - Habermas
216 debates.459 While Riceour does not discuss belonging in quite the same way that we do, his line of thinking does raise several immediate questions that clarify some of the features that a frame of belonging might possess.
5.4. While Gadamer proposes that knowledge of the humanities comes through belonging, and Habermas insists that we must critique the traditions to which we belong, Ricoeur proposes that both critique and belonging are necessary for human knowledge.
Within the context of philosophical hermeneutics, it has likely been the work of Hans-
Georg Gadamer that has most elevated the theme of belonging, particularly in his masterful
Truth and Method. While a full summary of the work exceeds the scope of this project, a cursory glance may still help us find our ground. Much of the controversy around the book might be encapsulated within its very title, as it might mean, and was indeed taken by Ricoeur to mean, two terms in opposition rather than in intersection. That is, Gadamer seems to argue that truth, the understanding of reality accomplished by the human arts and sciences, particularly history, has, since the Enlightenment, become overshadowed by and unduly subject to method, the understanding of reality accomplished by the physical sciences.460 This comes to bear for us because, in Gadamer’s understanding, the truth accomplished by the humanities requires belonging, whereas the methods of the human sciences require an objective and critical distance.
For Gadamer, we belong because our understanding is both historical and linguistic. We understand as creatures of our own times, bound to traditions that predispose our understanding,
459 “(1) Can hermeneutic philosophy account for the legitimate demand of the critique of ideology, and if so at what price? Must it sacrifice its claim to universality and undertake a profound reformulation of its program and its project? (2) On what condition is the critique of ideology possible? Can it, in the last analysis, be detached from hermeneutic presuppositions?” Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 271. 460 Jerald Wallulis, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Conflict of Ontologies,” International Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1984): 283.
217 and become conversant with contemporaries through the medium of language in a “fusion of horizons.”
Far from being biases to be done away with, historically-affected consciousness and the linguisticality of understanding are the inescapable conditions that make knowledge in the human sciences possible. Gadamer famously summarizes his argument in the statement: “Being that can be understood is language.”461 Because historicality and linguisticality are conditions beyond our control, the understanding of truth is less something that we attain and more an event that happens to us.462 It is, to quote Gadamer, “not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and our doing.”463 For Gadamer, the realization of truth ends up being, or at the very least entailing, a transformation. An example of such transformation would be when the audience of a play is swept up into an alternative reality that makes their own more real by raising it into its own truth.464
Suffice it to say that, as readers of Ricoeur, we find much of use here, but to understand
Ricoeur’s eventual mediating tack, it may make sense to first summarize Gadamer’s sharpest interrogator, Habermas. In providing this summary, I rely on an essay by Paul Giurlanda.
According to Giurlanda, whereas Habermas agrees with Gadamer on the necessity of critiquing the purportedly objective techniques of the sciences and of societies which value scientific knowledge to the exclusion of the human,465 Habermas departs sharply from Gadamer when it comes to the value of, as it happens, self-reflection.466 For Gadamer, the most one can do is
461 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 432. 462 Wallulis, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Conflict of Ontologies,” 284. 463 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xvi. 464 Wallulis, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Conflict of Ontologies,” 296. 465 Paul Giurlanda, “Habermas’s Critique of Gadamer: Does It Stand Up?,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1987): 33. 466 Giurlanda, 34.
218 acknowledge one’s own prejudices, and adjust them when presented with new experience or information. For Habermas, the ability to reflect on our prejudices allows us to establish a way of thinking that is interested in, precisely, dis-interested thought. This becomes important because, even though language in practice is corrupted by structures of power that Gadamer does not acknowledge, we can share the results of our reflection with others and come, at least in theory, to an agreement about what constitutes a proper conversation.467 That is, while the contents of a conversation may not themselves be subject to a disinterested analysis, conversations themselves can and should be. And once that is acknowledged, Habermas has the disinterested means, he thinks, by which conversations in history – that is, the traditions to which we belong – can and must be judged.468
This argument clearly presents a sharp challenge to Gadamer – and implies another as well. The possibility that Habermas raises of being able to critique tradition raises the implicit question to Gadamer that some traditions certainly ought to be critiqued. It is one thing to belong to a benevolent tradition that seeks the best interests of all those who belong to it – or at least allows them the freedom to pursue those interests. It is quite another, as so many have experienced, to belong to a tradition that oppresses, represses, or alienates oneself or others.
Nearer to Gadamer’s time, the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial
Japan all manifested authoritarian examples of what we shall call bad belonging, going to the extreme of executing dissenters and outsiders. Habermas is neither the first nor the last to raise the specter of relativism against Gadamer’s thinking, and the tragic examples of history ought to give any reader of Gadamer serious pause.
467 Giurlanda, 37. 468 Giurlanda, 37.
219 It is at this point that Ricoeur enters, eager to mediate between the Gadmerian acknowledgement that we are inevitably products of the traditions to which we belong, while conscious of the Habermasian suspicion that those who belong to traditions will naturally seek to extend them through all manner of means – even, perhaps, including violence. If traditions need criticism, and few would accept that they do not, we must have some justifiable, reasonable grounds upon which to do so. This remains true despite Gadamer’s rejoinder that the critiques themselves are often naïve about the origins of their own position. And it remains true despite a real problem of application, in that Habermas’s conversational principles, since he agrees with
Gadamer that rules only exist in their applications, would have to be applied by means of some other principle that has not yet been disclosed.469
Ricoeur thus opts for a different track. Whereas Gadamer argues on behalf of humanitarian belonging against scientific alienation, and Habermas argues for critical separation from authoritarian appropriation, Ricoeur steps in to argue, quite persuasively, that productive distanciation is needed alongside proper belonging.470 As one who has studied the structuralist approach to language, Ricoeur understands that language itself can be subjected to the very sort of scientific and objective analysis that Gadamer would aver is impossible.471 Particularly in texts, but in all forms of discourse, one may understand the objective features or structures of a work that make its coherence and meaning possible. Indeed, Ricoeur reminds us, it is precisely these things that we do understand when we read a text, and to be able to explain them is evidence of our understanding. For what else is there in a text to understand, after all, if not its structures and meaningful features?
469 Wallulis, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Conflict of Ontologies,” 39. 470 Giurlanda, “Habermas’s Critique of Gadamer: Does It Stand Up?,” 299–300. 471 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, xix-xxi.
220 Under Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative, it is precisely the technical, analyzable features of a text that generate its meaning – rather than the intent of its author. This is what allows us to take a more “objective” or distanced analysis when we engage a text – not by viewing it from nowhere, but by attending to the structures and features of the world it creates.
This critical “distance” is even evident in conversations, as what we understand when we talk to another person is not the experience of saying the words, but the meaning of the conversation that follows from the conversation, analogous to our understanding of the world of the text whenever we read a work of discourse. Our ability to understand meaning by analyzing structure extends even to traditions, which are conversations extended in time, often through texts. When we appropriate the knowledge and practices that traditions contain, we are appropriating the very objective structures and meaningful features by which those same traditions are distinguished.
There would be no appropriation of tradition that does not include this distanciation, or else it would be extraordinarily difficult to say, exactly, what it is we are appropriating.
While Ricoeur does not regard the structuralist moment as the ultimate one, preferring instead a critical appreciation or a “third naiveté” concerning the meaning that follows after engaging critical suspicion, he does believe that understanding must pass through the objective, analyzable features of a work or, in our present focus, of the conversation extended in time that is tradition.472 The pair of original belonging and voluntary critique form, in fact, a dialectic by which humans know. That is, there is no belonging without distanciation. Even the most methodical, objective knowledge must acknowledge its roots in, and indebtedness to, its origins in tradition and its own historic moment. Likewise, a tradition must not extend itself indefinitely without encountering the distanciated analysis of the fruits among its branches. For either
472 Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding,” 130.
221 element to advance without the other, belonging without distanciation, or the natural sciences without the human ones, is at a minimum to invite dysfunction and at most to produce either the zealotries of the French Enlightenment, on the one hand, or the horrors of the pogrom, on the other. In a way, with this dialectic Ricoeur wisely warns us, once again, of the dangers of
“masterful” being.
5.5. A philosophical study of belonging might reveal that traditions will inevitably be critiqued as they populate a world of conflicting belongings
Those who would consider a frame of belonging may gain much from the conversation of
Gadamer, Habermas, and Ricoeur. Perhaps uniquely in the Western hermeneutical tradition,
Gadamer’s originary belonging seems equivalent to our suggestion that a frame of belonging incorporate social relation at a primordial level. If we see in developmental research the idea that our sense of who we are follows from interacting with our parents, we might also see in Gadamer the idea that our sense of who we are follows from belonging to our tradition. Through Gadamer, we can see that what occurs at the familial level seems congruous with what occurs at the social level. And the Habermasian critique reminds us that a frame of belonging will have to deal with the specter of “bad belonging” in a real and substantive way. Mature persons may not be able to elide or effectively deny their grounding origins, but we would seem to be denying something of their development if we could never critique them. Any frame of belonging which seeks to incorporate the rational capacities of adults will thus have to involve, even celebrate, the self’s critical reflectivity. And finally, in our understanding of development, we do agree with Ricoeur that understanding occurs through critique, though we might hazard that our chief relation with other persons is not primarily epistemic in the traditional sense.
222 More, we see that Gadamer’s discussion in Truth and Method ineluctably becomes a forceful analysis of the limitations of method alone. So we who would begin to imagine a frame of belonging would note, as Ricoeur does for recognition, that to our knowledge there is still no definitive philosophical work about belonging, either what it means or what it entails.
Habermas’s – and then Ricoeur’s – critique to the effect that Gadamer gives critical distanciation short shrift only develops in a kind of apophatic way what we might be able to say, or what
Gadamer might further say, about belonging.
For our part, we have been using the concept of belonging in the sense of orienting individual participation in a larger society in a way that helps secure subjective identity. When one belongs to a group, such as a family, one finds oneself a part of social activity that meaningfully describes the self. I belong with my family; I am a member of a club; I am a citizen of this nation.473 Alas, we have neither the time nor the space to consider other iterations, and might suggest, then, that a frame of belonging could answer the Habermas-Ricoeurian critique by, indeed, developing our understanding of belonging. We imagine that we might do so in several ways.
First, it seems to us that those who would develop a framework of belonging should worry less about whether or not the members of a society will be able to summon a critique and more about how the powers of society will respond whenever critique occurs. That is to say, as traditions or families extend themselves either in duration through time or across the topography of the present day, they will naturally produce differentiation by manifesting themselves in varying situations. Indeed, this argument would seem to fit within Gadamer’s own assertion that
473 Thus we would exclude less meaningful, more temporary participation: “I’m a patron of this restaurant, a witness to this crime, a passenger on this bus.”
223 traditions carry forward a project of understanding that is never closed.474 Christianity, if we may make an example of a religion, has faced upheaval many times in its history, leading to both division and continuation.475
So it is not as though belonging does not produce its own critique, some of it quite sharp.
No tradition of any kind is utterly homogenous in practice, no matter how authoritarian its bent.476 Indeed, read another way, it may be that the very kind of objective critique that
Habermas insists upon and Ricoeur puts to use is exactly the way that new traditions are produced, and old ones continued through transformation. We all, eventually, if we may borrow the phrase from the Hebrew Bible, leave our parent’s house and make our own, for reasons that are very much our own. This does not mean, necessarily, that the old society ends, dies, or is dissolved. It may simply mean that its members must come to a new understanding, as Chuang
Tzu once did.
The question of whether or not a tradition will or can come to a new understanding of itself may speak to the important question of bad belonging. It seems to us that although variance comes to all societies eventually, there is a very real difference in how they respond to that difference. The authoritarian regimes that seek to squash dissent, particularly through violence, seem to be the very ones who isolate and alienate their members through fear, intimidation, and
474 “But with Aristotle and a tradition reaching down to the present, one can derive an image of right living… [O]ne would have to agree with Aristotle that this guiding image, socially performed though it is, continually determines itself further…. It is thus that the guiding image of the individual as of the society is formed, and in such a way that the ideals of a younger generation, precisely in differing from those of the older, determine them further.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 572–73. 475 Stephen B. Bevans and Roger Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today, American Society of Missiology Series 30 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). 476 If Ricoeur is right that there is a “credibility gap” due to even democratic states invariably exceeding the justified power given to them by their citizens, then it seems there may also be a “suppression gap” due to even tyrannical states failing to utterly extinguish dissent – a divide not broad enough to allow lassitude, certainly, but wide enough perhaps to allow hope. Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 315.
224 narrow pledges of loyalty. More democratic societies, particularly through discourse, can encourage their members to empathize with and collaborate with one another, belonging as they will in varying situations and contexts. Though belonging as we understand it seems to be an inescapable and defining part of being a self, it does not seem to be something that can be forced
– at least, not in a way that encourages the growth and development of the self. Though belonging may begin involuntarily – and we would argue that, through the family, it indeed does begin this way – ongoing coercion in its continuance seems to be part and parcel of bad belonging. We imagine that a frame of belonging would allow the self the freedom to grow, reason, and critique – not as an antidote to belonging, but as part and parcel of it. Those who would continue vital traditions allow them to be disrupted.477
To acknowledge the existence of bad belonging and to embrace the growth of critique is to acknowledge that, because no tradition is utterly homogenous, extending uniformly in time and space, and because some critiques become new traditions all their own, we exist in a world in which there can be conflicts of belonging. Because no family exists in isolation, all selves must, always and already, belong to more than one tradition, and some of these will, inevitably, have competing priorities and claims. There will be less of a need to establish a critical remove from the traditions we inhabit if we are confronted with alternatives even as we continue to inhabit them. Such confrontations may be a way to develop the self as it accrues meanings in the world.
477 Ricoeur, 324. As he states his more sophisticated version of this notion: “We only take possession of the creative power of imagination through a relation to such figures of false consciousness as ideology and utopia. It is as though we have to call up on the “healthy” function of ideology to cure the madness of utopia and as though the critique of ideologies can only be carried out by a conscience capable of regarding itself from the point of view of “nowhere.”
225 One way of understanding the roots of critique may be, then, to say that critique – and its resolution – is what occurs when competing traditions or factions encounter one another through their members. Part of belonging, after all, seems to entail deciding which traditions to continue to belong to or to begin to belong to, and finding a way to negotiate the resulting conflicting social ties. Indeed, from what source other than competing traditions, or from breaks within any one tradition, could that critique come? We may compare traditional or institutional totality to the dangers of alienation for the self. If all the self encounters is its own originating tradition, it may become subject to a totalization of its own thinking, and never develop a capacity for reasoned, impassioned self-critique. If so, this lack or reflectivity on the part of either a tradition or a self would come not as the result of a dearth of cognitive capacity or rational wherewithal, but rather through a dearth of conflict-in-relationship. A self imagined in a frame of belonging thus seems roughly similar to a tradition as Gadamer describes it. A self, like a tradition, develops over time by progressively changing through various contexts. As it does so, its identity, far from becoming dissolute, becomes clearer as its principle elements cohere, though it cannot be reduced to those elements. At this point, where the similarities between a self and a tradition seem apparent, it becomes incredibly important to determine whether a tradition is primarily a tradition of texts, of discourse committed to writing, as Ricoeur writes, or whether it is primarily a conversation between persons both dead and living in time, as Gadamer seems to imply. It is worth taking some time to establish this difference. For Ricoeur, “[b]efore being an inert deposit, tradition is an operation that can only make sense dialectically through the exchange between the interpreted past and the interpreting present.”478 Since Ricoeur thinks that what is best interpreted is texts, it follows that for him tradition is going to be largely the
478 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 221.
226 transmission of understandings of texts throughout time.479 Yet when Gadamer describes tradition, he does so thusly:
A written tradition is not a fragment of a past world, but has already raised itself beyond this into the sphere of meaning that it expresses. The ideality of the world is what raises everything linguistic beyond the finitude and transience that characterize other remnants of past experience. It is not this document, as a piece of the past, that is the bearer of tradition, but the continuity of memory. Through it tradition becomes part of our own world, and thus what it communicates can be stated immediately…. As we have said, all writing is a kind of alienated speech, and its signs need to be transformed back into speech and meaning. Because the meaning has undergone a kind of self-alienation through being written down, this transformation back is the real hermeneutical task.480
Thus, though both Ricoeur and Gadamer recognize that tradition is mostly what is written, the place and purpose of that writing is different: for Ricoeur, it serves as liberation from the author’s intent and context, for Gadamer it seems the necessary means to continuing memory through interpretive and re-creational “play.” This distinction between the purpose of texts in tradition for Ricoeur and Gadamer matters because if a tradition is inherently textual, then it will be indeed subject to the Ricoeurian dialectic of writing and distanciation: coming to understand a tradition will be the same as being able to explain, through analysis, its significant and defining features. That is how, indeed, we may understand a work. But if the place of textuality in tradition is secondary to the memory or meaning that is conveyed, then a model of empathetic, ordinary conversation between persons would force us to ask if, in fact, the most salient thing about a tradition might not be the relation between the persons involved, rather than the structure, event, or even the meaning of any of the words passing between them.
479 “Finally, mediation by texts: at first sight this mediation seems more limited than the mediation by signs and by symbols, which can be simply verbal and even non-verbal. Mediation by texts seems to restrict the sphere of interpretation to writing and literature to the detriment of oral culture. This is true. ” Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 17. 480 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 394–95.
227 There is some reason to believe that the more Gadamerian understanding of a tradition continuing through a discourse that brings meaning back from signs is more accurate than the more Ricoeurian understanding of a tradition in which texts free traditions from the intent of their original authors. As Rodolphe Calin puts it, summarizing and quoting Levinas:
[H]ermeneutics has here a communal dimension, that is to say, it is written in some way under the dictation of the Other: “it is certainly not impossible to invoke the presence of the poetic faculty in the largest sense in hermeneutics in guiding the listening and reading. Nevertheless the virtues and the authority of the master, that is to say, the violences of the tradition and of community, designate the heteronymous limits of the sponteneity of this poetry essential to signification.” The critique of Levinas is not limited to reaffirming the rights of a lived experience of faith against what Ricoeur calls textuality; but it detects, in the very interpretation of the text of faith, the irreducible presence of a psychism of obedience that the community excercises over the hermeneut, across the necessary reference of my lecture about Torah to the reading of others. Faith is only educated by the text because it is always at the same time educated by the community which determines the reading. It is with others that I welcome, in Ricoeur’s terms, the world of the text, and thus always in the obedience to the other.481
In other words, no hermeneut lives alone, entire as his or her own self. Though the distanciation of a text may introduce the possibility of freeing the meaning of the texts around which traditions orient themselves, the hermeneutic process itself is grounded in the very persons who teach one how to approach texts – in many cases, the very same people who have brought one into a tradition in the first place. This linking of tradition and communities of interpretation does not mean that critiquing a tradition is impossible; it does mean that critiquing a tradition is going to require more than referring to or critiquing the understanding of a text by referring to the features of the text. Critiquing a tradition is also going to require confronting the persons who surround one and the culture that they have created. Communities of interpretation, after all, do not only interpret the texts around which they form; they also interpret one another and the
481 Rodolphe Calin, “Le Soi et Le Sens. Soi Ethique et Soi Poetique Chez Levinas et Ricoeur,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 35, my translation. Quoting Emmanuel Levinas, L’Au-Delà Du Verset: Lectures et Discours Talmudiques (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, n.d.), 121.
228 interpretive norms and practices which they, together, continue. It is likely that, through oral cultures, there have been traditions without texts as we Ricoeurians understand them; it is most unlikely indeed that we have had traditions without persons as anyone understands them. And if it is true that texts and the rules of their interpretations are inextricably entwined, in a tradition, with the persons involved, then it becomes more salient that understanding a person seems at least somewhat unlike being able to explain, through analysis, their significant and defining features. Children – if we might consider the family to be a kind of small tradition – may be astute biographies of their parents, but they are seldom of an explanatory kind. Their understanding of their parents seems not to rely upon distanciated analysis. Indeed, stepping outside of oneself as well as another person would seem to greatly impede imitative understanding of that person. In other words, tradition, as a form of knowledge, has linguisticality, that much is certain – but if tradition inherently involves other people, if it is a conversation, then it will also have rhetoricity, in which case tradition will bear not only the logos of its organizing structure but also the pathos of its resonating feeling and the ethos of its orienting aim. If this is so, a tradition will involve elements that may be susceptible to objective analysis, but such analysis will never exhaust its meaning.
Unlike the understanding of a text, the understanding of a person through mimesis may produce, but does not seem to require, objective, reflective analysis. People strive to imitate, for their part, admired people and not only their most critical features, the whole far more than the sum. We might find characteristics such as heroism laudable, but we hardly find them imitable except as particular persons live them out, and even then have difficulty imitating only the admirable parts of persons. Objective analysis would not, then, seem to be a critical part of empathetic understanding, though it may be a significant part of differentiation, as imitators,
229 good artists all, distinguish themselves over time. Of course, when we remember that distance equaling difference is itself a metaphor,482 we who consider a frame of belonging wonder why we did not start with a dialectic of belonging and differentiation rather than distanciation in the first place. The difference between distanciation and differentiation must be, to be sure, largely connotative, because the entire point of metaphor “bringing two objects suddenly near” through association is to highlight similarity in difference, and this is precisely our aim here. Yet we should be careful, lest we think that difference necessarily equals distance, and thus quite possibly alienation. Worse, the possibility of introducing such confusion between distance and difference by using only this topographic metaphor seems an unnecessary risk when we consider another, quite possibly more apt biological metaphor of taxonomy in differentiation. Many quite distinct species exist in proximity, both fraught and friendly, just as children can and do come to distinguish themselves from their parents by observing their respective places in a common family rather than by going as far away from them as possible, or by understanding themselves as utterly and entirely unique. A frame which remains focused on belonging might, perhaps, adopt just such metaphors of taxonomy, noting that traditions, like selves, seem to cohere and clarify themselves in time. Eschewing the liminal metaphor of separation, exemplary persons may even distinguish themselves within traditions, becoming pinnacle Thomists, quintessential classicists, or any number of individuals who so vividly understand and distill their tradition that they come to embody and strengthen it, “standing out” by the very extent and virtue of their belonging.
482 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. I refer to the type of conceptual metaphor the authors establish. There is no absolute, logical need to conceive of distance as difference rather than, say, distinction. It is simply a useful heuristic that occurs to us because more different things usually are separated. Like all metaphors, it is a category mistake, confusing topography with taxonomy. It may or may not be universally helpful when describing people.
230 As the self becomes clearer, the self – just as a tradition might – eventually distinguishes itself from its parents – again, not necessarily as an antidote to belonging, but certainly as part and parcel of an organic process of growth. Indeed, we who imagine a frame of belonging would be as suspicious of a self that does not change at all as we would be of a tradition that refused to alter its most minute detail. We would suspect that such a self, like a tradition of brittle and unyielding conformity, would perish sooner rather than later. Indeed, selves imagined in a frame of belonging might define themselves not by what they essentially are, by some unyielding internal criteria or characteristic, but by the diverse ways in which they are, like the best traditions – and the best metaphors – alive in the world. We are thus ready to speak of at least two elements that a self that is born in a frame of belonging might have. For if a self will endure, indeed cohere, through various belongings – and thus through various meanings and understandings – it will have at least two features that we have seen metaphor to have: vitality and polysemy, and of the two it is vitality that most interests we who are alive.
5.6. Our course of studies suggests that we must search for new metaphors for self, other, and their relation if we are to understand, and perhaps unleash, the polysemic vitality of the self.
We said in the beginning of our course of studies that we would be considering the origin of metaphor as a means to further our understanding of the person. We hope now that imagining a frame of belonging might extend metaphor’s exploratory power a little bit further. For a frame is, among other things, composed of its metaphors. The “buffered” self is itself a metaphor, where the most important thing about the relation between self and other is not the literal distance between them, but the psychological and relational gap that physical distance helps us to imagine. The same is true of the “hermeneutical gap” between past and present times, wherein
231 the passage of time matters less than the difference between past and present human experiences.
We would hazard that, in a similar way, calling the human persons that surround us “others” helps us to imagine them as strange, distant or mysterious, whether or not that image is accurate or salutary – and we have already suggested that we might consider “parent” as one alternative.
What we suggest now is that metaphor itself may offer a similar grounding image – or, rather, two images, for we would borrow from Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor that it is both polysemic and alive. Naturally, when we say alive we do not mean that the most important thing about our living is our survival. Rather, we mean to suggest, as Ricoeur does, that the most important thing about being alive for humans is not their mere survival, but rather their vitality, or liveliness – a fair synonym for thriving. Likewise, we would hope to say that the most important thing about polysemy for people is not simply that they would mean various things to various others, but rather it is the meaning and worth that many meanings might bring to someone. We also would hope to suggest that, as in metaphor, vitality and polysemy come entwined.
Indeed, if Ricoeur is right to say that a metaphor without vitality is dead, then we may be able to say that a self that entirely lacks vitality is in some sense dead as well. And when that occurs, the question of whether or not the self still possesses its defining components becomes somewhat removed in importance – particularly, we suppose, for that particular self. In other words, a philosophical anthropology within our frame of belonging may need to take some accounting of the fact that vitality, as an experienced quality, might become more important for the self than any single defining feature, or indeed, any definition at all. Among the dimensions of a belonging self, vitality may be both an odd and necessary emphasis that informs, or ought to inform, our understanding of its more classical features.
232 And of course, to talk about vitality in a Ricoeurian context is to talk about polysemy, which goes hand in hand with vitality. There is no vitality for metaphor without polysemy, without that ability of a metaphor to mean different things at various times to several people – but never to mean all things to everyone at once. Indeed, the nearer a metaphor comes to retaining only one definition, the nearer it comes to death. Likewise, we suppose that a belonging self will find that to live among people is to relinquish any one narrow, singular, unchanging definition. We have seen this already to be the case when considering traditions which endure precisely by their polysemy, by means of their variation and multiple manifestations. Why should the life of a single person be so different? Part of our being alive, part of our vitality, may well be the degree to which we may produce various manifestations of ourselves in various times and contexts, though we never, of course, could or should be all persons to everyone. If vitality and polysemy go hand in hand, our ability to “mean” various things, to resist any one definition, might inform our understanding of the belonging self as much as vitality does.
The self —if it is like metaphor—might then be crafted, both learned from and presented before other people, wrought in a creative, inter-personal process full of adaptation, improvisation, and change before coming before others as a product-in-process. It may be odd to think of selfhood as a skill, but the self traces the same journey from private to public that metaphor does. Selves emerge from the intimate, imitative crucible of their home to step into the public square, embracing and embodying a particular point of view, challenging and being challenged by others.
So when it comes to the dynamic development that is the human self, it may be better to speak of the techne of the farmer or gardener, and of the cultivation of belonging. Selves may be crafted, both by our own wishes and the needs of those around us. Yet the quality of vitality
233 ought to inform what sort of crafting we imagine when we apply that word to the belonging self.
We do not manufacture ourselves as in a woodshop, or as we would a pot. To be a living self means to host forces one can hope to only direct, and not entirely control. The process is one of growth more than of production. If so, this would clarify a relation of self and society in that we might imagine it growing neither haphazardly nor in a forced direction, but winding around a sort of social trellis, dependent upon the trellis’s structure for form, defined by but not confined within its strictures, a work born within a genre but not reducible to it.
The question of defining features speaks also to the quality of polysemy, of the ability of the belonging self, perhaps, to manifest itself in many different ways, for many different people, though never, of course, in all ways for everyone. To be woven into a world of belonging may be precisely to wind one’s way among various groups and traditions, though rooted in the soil of one’s own conditionality. If so, what would occur would not be the ruination of the self through dissolution but the cultivation of the growing self through challenge, contest, and improvisation.
This is so not because the self lacks defining features but because the defining features are precisely those that not only endure change but also develop the vital self in all its contexts.
Managing polysemy may well be part and parcel of the techne of our becoming, as well as our belonging.
That other people are so fundamentally and inextricably involved in the cultivation of the self speaks to the implications of our second chapter, on testimony and the resounding influence of others in our lives. We who imagine a frame of belonging and a cultivated self imagine also our own dependence on seeds planted by others. Our genesis cannot be our own, any more than a metaphor can begin of its own imagining. If the cultivation of the self is a techne that can be learned, it is one that must be learned from others. And if the self is vital and alive, emerging as
234 it grows through various contexts that cannot be entirely anticipated, that techne of cultivation seems unlikely to be learned through thematization, through lecture, or through structural analysis. Rather, the belonging self may learn cultivation through imitation, not only of a verbal proficiency but of a way of being in and understanding the world. That this mimesis will not be entirely conscious, let alone put into language, implies that it will emerge as a response to the imitated. Indeed, this may be how the belonging self emerges, brought to life, quickened, in response to others – not just to one other but to many different others.
Indeed, if, as Levinas implies, we are bells rung, it should surely matter if we only ever produce one tone, or if we manage to reverberate in something like a harmony. We would be stunted, dulled, or cut off short indeed if we were only as our parents leave us; but as the belonging self becomes its own response to teachers, friends, neighbors and lovers, it may resound in richer, more varied tones. Indeed the belonging self would be precisely the patterns emerging through these sounds. And so it should matter that there is more than one sound, one striking, lest the music of the self collapse, still, and ossify of its own accord. This is how the vitality of the belonging self may be caught up in its testimony: if vitality is the energy, the animating vibration of all the organs of the self, then others strike us anew in our instruction, and in many varied ways. The vitality of the belonging self as it learns from others may be inextricably bound up with its polysemy.
The polysemy of the belonging self may also attest to the vitalizing influence of others who are wholly other and, at the same time, not other at all. To imitate another person, to grow around and in response to them, is to know them in a profound way that seems quite different than many of our other ways of knowing. As an orientation of our being, this knowledge of the belonging self may not always be reducible to words, and words which do speak to our knowing
235 may not always be narrative, may not always be encapsulated in a plot which contains a beginning, a middle, and an end. Attesting to others, the belonging self may well find itself addressed, as in a dialogue or letter. To speak of a belonging self may be to speak also of a discursive self as we respond, or rather are our own response, to other people. If so, the vitality of the self will be like the vitality of metaphor as we refer to others in an indirect way, one that avoids narrow or singular denotation and definition.
Thus, the belonging self will not only attest to others but will itself be presented for fruitful interpretations by those people around it. As others read the belonging self, they will make available to it a family of related readings which can both conflict and challenge the self’s reflective self-understanding – the singular, reflective definition toward which the self might otherwise tend. Others, addressing the belonging self, can free it from its own delineation. The polysemy by which the belonging self understands itself in various contexts may thus find its match in the polysemy by which it is understood. The vital self conceived within a frame of belonging may not be reducible to language, but might indeed thrive entwined in a series of lively conversations, so long as those are genuine encounters.
The intimacy with which others bend the course and bearing of the belonging self, wound up in words, speaks to a knowledge of ourselves and others that surpasses linguistic expression.
Others plant the seeds of ourselves before we even know that we are ourselves, building our sense of trust in them, a reliable world, and ourselves. Our very first interactions involve those who care for us, responding to our needs long before we can consciously voice them. Their responses too, are not always verbal, but involve a broader attunement of mental state and feeling that we call empathy.
236 Through empathy, the belonging self gains the materials and energy it needs to grow: trust in others to enter a reliable world, and trust in oneself that one’s own intuitions, emotions, and other internal experiences are reliable guides. When the belonging self sees “others” acting and speaking in the world, it realizes that such agency is possible, and may be possible for “me” too. Regardless of whether or not empathy has analyzable components, the belonging self empathizes with whole persons, and those whole persons empathize with the self as one who belongs. It is in this context that “feeling felt” matters, because it means that our most private feelings, our most intimate selves, are not isolated, but shared with others, grounding us together in the soil of a common emotional world. It may be precisely in this context that the belonging self will have the confidence it needs to emerge as a self that calls itself one, in the fullest sense of the word “self.” And it will be all the stronger for all the more empathy and trust it can build, with more persons, throughout the course of its life.
Indeed, the deep and numerous entwinings of the vital, belonging self may erode that other half of the liminal binary, the other. We might find the word “other” itself much less useful outside the liminal frame – and within the frame of belonging. This uselessness of “other” would come about because the self would meet persons that were, like itself, at one and the same time entirely unknown and ineluctably relatable, always already bearing indecipherable meanings that, when revealed – like the comparisons of a metaphor – may already seem familiar. This would be no less true for intimate companions than it would be for people encountered on the street. Such orienting knowledge of persons need not preclude – nor, with a sufficiently complex anthropology, could not preclude – the ability of those same persons to surprise us with unknown depths or unpredictable behavior. Indeed, since empathy as we have spoken of it is knowledge of living, shifting, bending things, it would cease to be knowledge the moment it refused to bend, to
237 fork, to wind around the polysemy of “you” and “me.” This is why we have spoken of empathy as simply ‘attunement,’ and not ‘understanding’ in the usual epistemic sense.
This odd way of knowing or attuning ourselves to persons is also why we have begun and ended our studies in metaphor. There is no word in English, yet, for our relation to persons upon whom we depend, but to whom we are not intimately related, and may not even know.
Previously, we have suggested ‘parent’, as that implies the direction of the self’s dependence, both of origin and of growth and learning. The Judeo-Christian tradition has suggested neighbor, implying our common plot in life, and that is something we should not forget. More than one religious community has adopted “brother” and “sister” as honorary titles. Doubtless, other traditions might offer other words that frame encounters between persons differently than we do in the West; the increasingly casual American “friend” may even be a fair, if more Ricoeurian, possibility. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggests still another when he proposes that we form bubbles or spheres with a “With” and an “Also.”483 A frame of belonging may well adopt one of these terms, or many, or perhaps none, preferring to find another word for alterity altogether.
Regardless, a frame of belonging would reconfigure our understanding of alterity, of other persons, as much as it would refigure our understanding of the self. Within a frame of belonging, we would no longer understand other persons as essentially alien, but as essentially
483 “What will one day be my speaking ego is an elaboration of that delicated place to which I learned to return as long as the With was close to it. In a sense, the shadower goes ahead of the shadowed; in so far as it exists, I also exist. The With is the first thing that gives and lets things be. If I have what it takes to turn from an Also into an ego, it is not least because the With has let me sense the place in which I have begun to find a rooting as an augmentable creature that feels across and is open in a polar fashion. Like an imperceptible, drawn-out lightning bolt illuminating the nightscape, the With introduces an inexhaustible difference into the homogenous monochrome by imprinting ways to approach the back-and-forth into the reawakening Here-Yonder sphere. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I (Los Angeles, CA: Seimotext(e), 2011), 356, https://monoskop.org/images/b/ba/Sloterdijk_Peter_Bubbles_Spheres_I_Microspherology.pdf.
238 accessible. This accessibility would arise not because of our powers of knowing but because of the common emotional and interior ground we share with other human persons. And it would persist when our encounter with other persons does not prove benevolent or salutary, because the empathetic commonality between persons only makes our encounter possible, and does not determine its outcome. Whether we who belong would allow our awareness of commonality to guide our own behavior during any encounter would remain, as many moral decisions do, a matter of our own choosing.
The belonging other may also be less abstracted than the one we have understood through the liminal frame, and much more specific, more allowing of concrete details. Both parent and neighbor begin to move in this direction, introducing specificity of relation and location in time and place, supplementing taxonomy with a contextual topography: human creatures in relational ecosystem. In a living world, no belonging other would be interchangeable with any other belonging other, or any belonging self. Whole persons resist abstraction. Entwining with polysemic people seems to mean wrapping one’s being around their own numerous entwinings.
If the belonging self is addressed by specific others, it also addresses them specifically, and is oriented to them as they live and grow. This understanding, too, can come from metaphor, which is nearly always addressed to a specific audience, tuned to a particular crowd. So we, too, will attune to particular others, even when they stand together.
We began this chapter by writing about the Chinese understanding of grief as death, as the undoing of the self in relation to an upheaval in its defining context. We contrasted this with the Western understanding of grief as loss, as the privation of the self’s dearest object within its compass of understanding. The frame of belonging understands grief quite differently than either of these, while borrowing something from each of them. That is, the frame of belonging will see
239 in death a death of the self as it loses the one with whom it had entwined, with whom it had empathized, whom it had imitated, and by whom it had been nourished. The belonging self will no longer, indeed, be itself without the departed. With the death of the other, the self has died; death has severed a strand of its being that cannot be restored. At the same time, the self will carry a version of the other forward, both by continuing their memory and by bearing the emptiness, the wound, that the death of the other ensures. Thus the self may extend the life of the dead in this world as both remembered other and as the very vines of the self that still live, entwined beyond separation, but changed for the entwining – another version or iteration of the self. Ultimately, the belonging self may, perhaps, feel the loss of the dead at the same time as they feel the self enriched by that loss, by greater awareness of their own vitality as they return to a life – and a self – that is forever changed by mourning.
Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative about the historian’s debt to the dead, about the animating, enriching obligation the chronicler owes the fallen of history to faithfully render what they did, and what happened to them.484 Can we not speak, then, of our own debt to the dead, not as a duty to remember them, but as a recognition that we already do, in the shape and liveliness of our being – indeed, as recognition that we are that memory, that loss, that particular privation and presence? If empathy allows the self to say “I am You,” in belonging through life, what can we say of belonging with the dead? For the selves who emerge after grief have been altered, made more complex, enriched by the influence of the living in a way that continues after they have gone. We can no longer say only that I am other, “I am You,” but must say “I am you as
484 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol 3, 257.
240 you left me,” remembering you not in my recall but in the warp and weft of my being, in the faithful shape in which I have grown.
To speak of recognizing a debt that has enriched, a burden that has strengthened, is to speak a word perhaps foreign to much philosophy: gratitude. Perhaps to mention this word is to come too uncomfortably close to religion, or, more likely, to poetry. But to suggest gratitude as a possible dimension of the self is not to suggest particular rituals or prescribe a particular ethic. It is to suggest a quality of imagination in which we may unfold our reflective thoughts, even our formal philosophies, not only with respect to the dead but also with regard to the living, who are only separated from death by time and circumstance. And all the living die, in some sense, every time they mourn and change. So if we are to belong anywhere, it is with these fellow dying, living things.
To encounter another in the frame of belonging, then, may well be to imagine them neither under the Hobbesian quality of anxiety about violence nor under the Ricoeurian quality of hope for mutuality, as the liminal frame would prefer. To encounter another in the frame of belonging may be to imagine them instead under the quality of gratitude for what I will become, indeed, what I am already becoming through the very moment of our encounter. If I stand within the frame of belonging, I am, among other things, you as you will leave me, and to meet you is to be increased, through many circumstances I do not choose. For you, whether parent or neighbor or some other relation, the word for which we do not yet know, will be an inescapable constant in my life from the very moment we meet, no matter the depth of our relation. For, once having met, no two people can be unmet.
Because of you, I ring. That is, I reverberate. Whether you will it or no, you have increased my meanings in this world. My reflective thoughts are later ripples in my
241 consciousness. So I cannot be only what I think of myself, the stories that I tell. I will also be what you think of me, and what stories you tell of me, and what we both make of all of them.
Like a living metaphor, I am not reducible to a single definition, if I ever tricked myself into thinking that I was. You will not allow me to become cliché, because you did not find me in a dictionary. There are limits to this process of interpretation, as I cannot mean everything, but because of you I will mean more. For the very fact of meeting you, the finite fan of my own possibilities will have broadened, thickened, grown more colorful and numerous. I will owe to you, if not my denotative definition, then a number of my lively connotations. From the very moment we meet, I am in your debt.
I say that I am ringing, but this is not the sound of inanimate things. So many things live because of you. In your face, metaphor blooms. Texts quicken when read in your voice, stories multiply in your understanding, much as I myself do. Indeed, if I live in my reverberations, I know that you preceded me even to our encounter. And I am only whatever lives in me. So the likeness cannot be to clanging metal but must be to living sounds, to words, to the human hums that vibrate around the self. Am I like prose, words without harmony? No, for I have said that I am not only vibrations, but patterns of resounding. Am I like poetry? No, for I have said I am words, but not only words. I cannot be essayed, thematized; grammatical analysis will not still the beating of my heart. No, if I belong, my likeness must be poetry set in harmony, words meshed in music. Alone, I plod along, an ordinary, prosaic sentence. But with you, I attain to the music of meanings that unfold in the melody and rhythms of ordinary life. And it is with you, belonging in gratitude, that I begin to sing. Indeed, I find I am the song.
242 CONCLUSION
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes of a Western world that has, since Aristotle, drifted successively further and further from virtue ethics until we are hardly capable of understanding the world in its terms, just as if scientists had inherited a world that, after a social collapse, was bereft of scientific understanding:
What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by fictitious pseudo- scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack the contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.485
Thus, not only do we no longer value virtue to the extent that the ancients did, we no longer really know what virtue actually is – hence his title “After Virtue.” While we remain unaware of any previously extant ethics of belonging per se –or an epistemology of empathy – if we really are reliant upon one another, at a primal, inchoate and inescapable level, not only for survival, but also to be selves in the first place, we in the individualistic West seem to have slipped our existential moorings, in much the same fashion as Macyntire warns us about on the ethical front.
After all, we in the West consider ourselves first as discrete individuals who then go on to form or fail to form relationships. We do not ordinarily understand ourselves as “belonging animals” that cannot live – or even be or become themselves – without their relationships. We may have once felt like we belonged, to varying degrees, in the ancestral village, the Greco-
Roman city, or the medieval burg – even perhaps, in the earliest nations of the Reformation and
485 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Third (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 2.
243 Enlightenment. This succession of habitats may even parallel Macyntire’s degradation of virtue.
Yet others, Charles Taylor chief among them, have documented precisely how the rise of individualism has meant the erosion of the ties that bind us, even including, in extremis, our losing the understanding that we share the same reality.486 And while it may be too much to claim that esteem for society must wane while the individual waxes, it certainly seems true that in Western liberal society, no cohesive social forces have emerged to match the emphasis it places upon the individual, conceived in isolation. The liberal West seems to have become
“unbalanced” in this sense.487 And, if the parallel to MacIntyre’s work holds, we might even have become so unbalanced that we no longer understand what belonging actually is.
The result has been what Arendt has called “the atomization of society,” which provides a fertile soil for totalitarian movements, among other ills. As she writes:
Social atomization and extreme individualism preceded the mass movements which much more easily and earlier than they did the sociable, non-individualistic members of the traditional parties, attracted the completely unorganized, the typical “non-joiners” who for individualistic reasons had always refused to recognize social links or obligations. The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal relationships.488
486 This is perhaps best expressed in his discussion of mutual incomprehension: “It is truer to say that in our world, a whole gamut of positions, from the most militant atheism to the most orthodox traditional theisms, passing through every possible position on the way, are represented and defended somewhere in our society. Something like the unthinkability of some of these positions can be experienced in certain milieu, but what is ruled out will very from context to context. An atheist in the Bible belt has trouble being understood, as often (in a rather different way) do believing Christians in certain reaches of the academy.” MacIntyre, 556. 487 As Patrick J. Deneen writes, “Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering signs of its failure. It has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities – unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised and abandoned at will. The autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining forces – the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit.” Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 16. 488 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1958), 316–17.
244 More contemporaneously, if less dramatically, during the course of our writing this thesis, political currents have emerged in American life which reveal a severe political tribalization, and present a danger of balkanization.489 Apparently, we still yearn for belonging, to such an extent that nearly any belonging will do – even the ersatz simulacrum of belonging bereft of physical proximity which empathy seems to require. And the dissolution of social ties seems not to be stopping any time soon: more people report that they have fewer tender feelings for others.490
How does our thesis – that a self developed through metaphor is, ultimately, a self that belongs in empathy – help us see our crisis of estrangement more clearly? We imagine that we might understand this crisis better by an analysis of its most obvious context: the Cartesian tradition of the self.491 Clearly, any self that is conceived within a frame of belonging such as we
489 “I’ve come to believe the master story – the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants – is the logic of polarization. That logic, put simply, is this: to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.” Ezra Klein, Why We Are Polarized (New York, NY: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 9. 490 “We found that college students, American college students, self-reported that they were becoming lower in empathy over time, when we looked at different samples and studies using a meta-analysis over time. Other researchers have also looked at national samples of high school seniors and college freshmen and found similar results that there had been declines over time in concern for others.” Sarah Konrath, PhD, Speaking of Psychology: The Decline of Empathy and the Rise of Narcissism, podcast, 2020, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking- of-psychology/empathy-narcissism. 491 Though the other contexts of our thesis do affect it, they are interdisciplinary and, as such, consist largely of questions for further exploration in light of philosophical concerns. Is empathy, attunement with another, actually a way of knowing? If so, of what can it consist – can it be wrong? Can one “feel felt” without being felt? How, exactly, do people know they are being empathized with? Given sufficient instruments, is attunement measurable as well as discernable? What evidence separates the empathy we feel between others from the sympathy we feel for the characters that actors portray, or those that authors create? These questions apply to developmental science as questions about its epistemology. Considering linguistic anthropology, we are presented with another set of questions, since so much of our communication seems supra-verbal. Kristeva notably remarks that, in a way, women are dolphins, as their sub-verbal clucks, tssks and sighs to their children communicate significant emotion and meaning. Perhaps we could, in the same manner in which Ricoeur saw Aristotle exploring the lexis of our thought, philosophically investigate the wordless sounds and gestures that animate our lives, and clarify the diction of our empathy. We might also consider the epistemic status of family, where others begin as alien to us and then become so familiar that they are contrasted with strangers. Then again, estrangement itself can be reversed. What precisely is it, then, that happens as people come to know one another, or become more distant? And finally, a self that belongs can both learn from the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition and ask questions of it. Certainly it is salutary to highlight orphans as a group worthy of special protection, but contemporary religious ethics must answer why children as a whole are not, especially considering the importance of childhood to the development of all mature adults, and therefore of communities of every kind. It seems that, within a frame of belonging, Judeo-Christian
245 propose will offer, largely, a study in contrasts to this tradition. “I feel felt,” which we might offer as a terse summary statement of the self that does belong, brings us some considerable distance from Descartes’s cogito on two fronts. First, the belonging self relies less on reflective thinking about the self and more on understanding feelings as the self experiences them; understanding the belonging self will require uncovering the “logic” of emotion as well as the logic of rationality. In this vein, a philosophy of belonging, particularly a phenomenological one, would grapple more with psychology than the continental Cartesian (and anti-Cartesian) tradition has done. Second, a belonging self breaks definitively with what some regard as the deepest flaw of the Cartesian self, its solipsism. Feeling felt, that key development of the belonging self, manifestly requires other persons in a way that the Cartesian self does not. Even Ricouer’s “I am another,” while invoking the other to gain an understanding of the self, does not invoke the other to the same extent that “feeling felt” does, especially if we allow that self-understanding is not, necessarily, the very thing that makes the self (which is, of course, a supposition that the frame of belonging challenges). If we are at all more than our own understanding of ourselves (and we have become convinced through these studies that we must be) then it would behoove us to open our Western selves to realize that our most private understandings of ourselves have already been provided by others, and thus there is little lost in seeking new understandings of ourselves through others. To this end, a frame of belonging would suggest that a philosophical anthropology adopting this frame would develop a philosophy of family, and then forcefully articulate in philosophical terms the ways that our most intimate relationships form our identities
– both in childhood and throughout our lives. As one might expect to be the case with such a new frame, a frame of belonging suggests work that has barely been performed within the traditional,
ethics may benefit from enlarging its focus to include, with rigor, issues of nurture and care as well as protection from injustice.
246 liminal frame. Any philosophy of familial belonging would have to expand its sole focus on individual rights and responsibilities, orient its understanding in the relationships that form persons, and think through the meaning of parenting and other bonds that produce human flourishing.
Yet not all the comparison between the possible future of the frame of belonging and the past of the liminal frame is contrast. Even within the narrower confines of French philosophical anthropology, the liminal frame has cracked before, as one would expect if it is an imperfect imagining of our nature. Jerrold Siegel might be said to provide a brief history of just such cracking, in his summary of three key French figures. After Descartes, Emile Durkheim seems to be one example of a crack in liminality, as he advances an understanding of individual consciousness that bubbles up from crowds; 492 the bohemian poet Arthur Rimbaud’s later attempts to “arrive at the unknown by the disorganization of the senses,” and his search for the
‘fatality’ of the ordinary self results in his coining the extraordinarily Ricoeurian phrase je est un autre – I is another.493 Later still, and just before Ricoeur, the philosopher Henri Bergson’s attempt to seek a realm of inner life not accessible to science leads to his discovery of duration and the two selves, the everyday self and the deep self, that together compose individual consciousness and bring about the evolution of society through persons and moments of authentic genius.494
492 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 481–82. citing Emile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,” in On Morality and Society, ed. Robert Bellah, trans. Charles Blend (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 151–52. 493 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 494–95. citing Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres, ed. Susan Bernard and Andre Guyaux, nouvelle edition revue (Paris: Bordas, 1991), 345–52.Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations and Other Prose Poems, Revised, vol. 56 (New York, NY: New Directions, 1957), 26–35. 494 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 520–21, citing Bergson, Essai Sur Les Données Immédiates de La Conscience, 95– 100; Bergson, 156–59.
247 A self that belongs in empathy both develops and critiques these prior constructions of a
“social” self. Durkheim’s assertion that individual consciousness arises from social energy is promising, considering what we know about how maternal affection affects the developing child.
We might say that he simply gets the size of the society wrong, not the direction of conditionality. Yet the same empathetic relationship shows us an area of sharper disagreement, in that Durkheim insists, with many in the West, that the body separates individuals and is the location of particular awareness. The science surrounding empathy and child development implies that this matter is not quite so clear. Our bodies, both in childhood and adulthood, adapt and respond to one another, through the work of mirror neurons and other processes. And, at another level, it is our bodies that provide for commonality in many ways that, reflection, say, does not. Our emotional, bodily lives are fairly congruent, and many people can readily identify with one another’s anger, fear, relief, and pleasure. The bodily experiences of eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, and death are the very ones that are universally manifest, and most available for common understanding. So it may make more sense to say that we belong through our bodies, and that our bodies mark our sociality, providing for whatever understanding we share, than it does to say that our bodies essentially separate and isolate us until we can reason our way together.
Thus, we who have begun to imagine a frame of belonging share Rimbaud’s intuition that society and self might be joined through the senses, though we may not share his disruptive aims.
If we take the findings of empathy research seriously, we could imagine disruption and disengagement from society to be occasionally necessary, and even salutary, but only insofar as they allow for development and growth. A self that belongs in empathy cannot imagine that its aim is alienation from society, any more than it can rest in the realization that we are other, alien
248 to ourselves. It would seem that a frame of belonging might understand the imprisonment
Rimbaud feels as the limitations of one particular society, and, thus, not necessarily every society.
Yet Rimbaud and Bergson both suggest a dynamic that the frame of belonging can with some modification, adopt, and that is the distinction between the false and genuine self. Read another way, this is the dynamic of individual becoming, of an identity that is not fixed and subsequently lived out, but rather emerges and consequently develops through time. If we do not start as ourselves but eventually become more individualized through time, we have certainly grown. Now, by this process of growth we do not mean to say that the end result of the process of our growth is our “true” or ultimate self, that before this point we are merely individual potentials coalescing from the social ether in the way that Durkheim imagines. Rather, if we can imagine the development of the person by means of its accruing dimensions, it seems to us that the individual begins in the sociality of the mother-infant dyad that grants a specific body, and then progresses through that to the sort of individual, reflective consciousness by which we mark and understand who we, in particular, are as adults. Thus it seems that a frame of belonging sees continuity and pattern in our belonging through the relationships in which we are engaged from infancy on, a process of becoming that is at once entangled with others and unique to us. Why is this becoming, this belonging-in-growth, not every bit as “true” to us as the adult, rational, and, hopefully, mutual individual that we eventually become? Our answer to this question may say as much about our time and place in history as it does about our “actual” self.
What may well be the case is that the self, over time, really does change – is, in fact, at least in part the process of its own changing – and that our particular personalities, over time, really do become more established. We might, somehow, become more ourselves in ways that
249 are also particular to each of us. If so, the holism, the deep self, sought by Bergson’s duration and fleshed out by Ricoeur’s narrativity, thus become vital to any reckoning of the self – including one that takes place within a frame of belonging. Yet unlike the liminal frame, within the frame of belonging we would not look inward to find such a self, but rather outward as we
“extend” ourselves through relationships in the world. This difference in turn leads us to value reflectivity differently than Rimbaud, who wants to break free from it, and differently from
Ricoeur, who wants to broaden it to include narrative. Within the frame of belonging, reflectivity would be one more point within a network of increasingly more complex and individualizing patterns. The self’s relationship with itself is still, after all, a relationship with another – but it is only one among many by which the self becomes itself.
Further, it seems to us that reflectivity cannot be as foundational as it is in Durkheim or other more traditional continental thinkers, nor can it be as primordial. Developmental research shows us that a significant part, though by no means all, of our identity is established in childhood, even in pre-reflective periods, and that identity cannot be lost, though it can be adumbrated. An anthropology done within a frame of belonging must make some account of this facet, while noting, perhaps, that even in the West the importance of childhood to adulthood is not a particularly new strain of thinking.495 Thus while we can by no means overlook reflectivity’s importance, particularly in accounting for our ability to critique our traditions of origin, there seems to be little denying that, by the time we get to reflectivity, we are always and already stamped with the impress of others, just as we are with the conditions of our own
495 With Freud as psychology’s seminal early figure, the importance of childhood to identity may be said to be psychology’s first great idea. More, Piaget’s later theory of developmental stages implies that the base of subsequent stages is laid in earlier ones – extending the idea of stages of development itself from medieval writers. See Matthews and Mullin, “The Philosophy of Childhood.”
250 physicality.496 Not only would this recognition of the formative nature of infancy and early childhood somewhat undermine Ricoeur’s account of the origins of metaphor in Aristotelian genius (and so also perhaps for other capacities), it also puts reflectivity more in the role of consequence than cause. Now, we in the West might still find reflectivity a beneficial and significant consequence, but hopefully within the frame of belonging we will not be consumed by it, nor imprisoned within our own self-absorption. At the very least, those within a frame of belonging who still wish to embrace the reflective, narrating self as an ultimate goal for life development would have to recognize that it is precisely through fulfilling, empathetic relationships that anyone will arrive at this destination.
So we see that a frame of belonging does mark out a sort of odd patch of terrain in the history of thinking about the self in the West. First, it agrees with the cultural frame of the
Chinese, as well as with Durkheim, that relations are inescapable, and that the self flows from or through them. Second, it joins Rimbaud and Bergson both in imagining a progression of the self that occurs in time. The historian Jerrold Siegel speaks of the traditional dimensions along which philosophers have considered the self – bodily, social, and reflective – while noting that multi- dimensional views of the self seem to have more rigor than unidimensional ones.497 The frame of belonging agrees wholeheartedly with this assessment – and adds that the self may also be, in addition to these things, dynamic, rather than static, comprehensive of all the self’s extension through its lifetime. Indeed, if there is one thing we may say about a self understood within a frame of belonging, it is that it would seem to be increasingly complex: first social, then social
496 Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh would have us believe that most of our metaphors are originally physical; a great deal of our language depends on metaphorical thinking; and that our bodies seem to order our thoughts in fundamental ways. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. 497 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 651.
251 and bodily, then social and bodily and reflective – a pattern perhaps repeated, spiraling, as the self develops through adulthood.
A self imagined within a frame of belonging thus shares a long border with Ricoeur’s narrativity, though it transcends the verbal and sees no need to begin in or unduly emphasize reflectivity. After all, there is no guarantee that reflective narration, which most grants us our sense of identity, is necessarily the source or core or exclusive summation of our identity.498
Understandings of the self which would remain true to the self, after all, might well attend to its composing dimensions as well as its ultimate form.499 A self understood within a frame of belonging would be no exception to this way of understanding the self.
We recall our original goal of using Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor to further our understanding of the self and its relation to alterity. If we have succeeded, it is because we have allowed the qualities of metaphor to illumine qualities of the self that have been neglected and overlooked, even if they have made minority reports in Western thought. We can hardly, then, understand vitality to be our own unique and novel anthropological announcement, if we allow that it is a rough equivalent for what many have spoken of as human thriving. Surely Marx and other utopians who have sallied forth with visions of humanity have done so by imagining they were bringing, in some fashion or other, more life to more people, even if they would do so through economic, technocratic, or other political means, or even if they would describe that life in other terms than those of vitality.
So we see that, while we in the liberal West may or may not have lost the ability to imagine what belonging actually is, it is possible to understand how the frame of belonging that
498 Seigel, 653. 499 Seigel, 364–65.
252 we propose sits within a hole or vacancy around which Western philosophy has repeatedly circled, and to which it has drawn fitfully near. Durkheim seeks the formative power of social forces, but aligns his understanding with a politics that proves contradictory; Rimbaud wants union with society, but attempts to find it through a disruption of the senses that seems more like alienation from the self than it does communion with others; Bergson understands a self that develops through time, but sees authenticity coming from within the self, where others do not seem to enter. Even Ricoeur, our muse and our guide throughout this study, sees the value of other persons for generating and understanding metaphor, but cannot extend a similar vitality of polysemy to the person as he understands it.
We cannot imagine that, in this brief list, we have begun to have exhausted the times that even modern Western philosophy has drawn close to imagining the world in a way that follows from belonging. We have chosen only a few examples from those fellow Frenchmen who were closest in time to Ricoeur. There are doubtless many other examples from various times and throughout the rest of Europe and the Americas – particularly if one includes the philosophies of religious movements that, almost by definition, must emphasize the goods of human relationships as well as their bounds. And if belonging really is a fundamental and orienting, but oft neglected or misunderstood, aspect of our being, this is exactly what we should expect: a surrounding terrain filled with the rubble of ideas that, for whatever reasons, did not quite take hold. These are our points of reference, not only markers warning of the times when thinkers of similar sentiment have perhaps fallen short, or turned away, but also highpoints by which we may orient ourselves.
Truly, even if we continue the orienting metaphors of topography that once consumed metaphor (distance meaning difference and separation, to the point where metaphors are
253 considered successful only to the extent to which they approach rhetorical degree zero from their dictionary definition),500 we must remember that not all topography need be understood as such, and landmarks presume a common ground as much as they presume separation of location. We are talking, in every case in this conclusion, about points on a common globe.
And even if we switch our metaphors once again, to a more Aristotelian taxonomy, we would be able to say that philosophies within a frame of belonging would be perhaps different species of philosophy, but could certainly not belong to different kingdoms or orders or classes of thinking. We who write this study belong to the genus of Western philosophy. We do so with gratitude, even if we hope to glimpse or perhaps imagine a little further than those who have gone before us – looking to an evolution that, like all good transformation, would lead to a species of more abundant life.
500 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 138–43.
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